
Class __ 
Book. 

CopigM Co p/-' a 

COBMGHT DEFOSm 



/ 



Short Histories of the Literatures 
of the World 

Edited by Edmund Gosse 




A HISTORY OF 

FRENCH LITERATURE 



EDWARD DOWDEN 

D. Litt., LL. D. (Dub.), D. C. L. (Oxon.), LL. D. (Edin.) 
LL. D. (Princeton) 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN 




IA 



NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1897 






Copyright, 1897, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



PREFACE 

French prose and French poetry had interested me 
during so many years that when Mr. Gosse invited me 
to write this book I knew that I was qualified in one 
particular — the love of my subject. Qualified in know- 
ledge I was not, and could not be. No one can pretend 
to know the whole of a vast literature. He may have 
opened many books and turned many pages ; he cannot 
have penetrated to the soul of all books from the Song 
of Roland to Toute la Lyre. Without reaching its spirit, 
to read a book is little more than to amuse the eye with 
printed type. 

An adequate history of a great literature can be written 
only by collaboration. Professor Petit de Julleville, in 
the excellent Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature 
Francaise, at present in process of publication, has his 
well -instructed specialist for each chapter. In this 
small volume I too, while constantly exercising my own 
judgment, have had my collaborators — the ablest and 
most learned students of French literature — who have 
written each a pail of my book, while somehow it 
seems that I have written the whole. My collaborators 
are on my shelves. Without them I could not have 
accomplished my task ; here I give them credit for 
their assistance. Some have written general histories 



vi PREFACE 

of French literature ; some have written histories of 
periods — the Middle Ages, the sixteenth, seventeenth, 
eighteenth, nineteenth centuries ; some have studied 
special literary fields or forms — the novel, the drama, 
tragedy, comedy, lyrical poetry, history, philosophy ; 
many have written monographs on great authors ; 
many have written short critical studies of books or 
groups of books. I have accepted from each a gift. 
But my assistants needed to be controlled ; they 
brought me twenty thousand pages, and that was too 
much. Some were accurate in statement of fact, but 
lacked ideas ; some had ideas, but disregarded accuracy 
of statement ; some unjustly depreciated the seventeenth 
century, some the eighteenth. For my purposes their 
work had to be rewritten ; and so it happens that this 
book is mine as well as theirs. 

The sketch of mediaeval literature follows the arrange- 
ment of matter in the two large volumes of M. Petit 
de Julleville and his fellow-labourers, to whom and to 
the writings of M. Gaston Paris I am on almost every 
page indebted. Many matters in dispute have here to 
be briefly stated in one way ; there is no space for 
discussion. Provencal literature does not appear in this 
volume. It is omitted from the History of M. Petit de 
Julleville and from that of M. Lanson. In truth, except 
as an influence, it forms no part of literature in the 
French language. 

The reader who desires guidance in bibliography will 
find it at the close of each chapter of the History edited 
by M. Petit de Julleville, less fully in the notes to 



PREFACE vii 

M. Lanson's History, and an excellent table of critical 
and biographical studies is appended to each volume 
of M. Lintilhac's Histoire de la Litterature Francaise. 
M. Lintilhac, however, omits many important English 
and German titles — among others, if I am not mistaken, 
those of Birsch-Hirschfeld's Geschichte der Franzosichen 
Litteratur : die Zeit der Renaissance, of Lotheissen's im- 
portant Geschichte der Franzosichen Litteratur im XVII. 
Jahrhundert, and of Professor Knight's learned Philo- 
sophy of History (1893). 

M. Lanson's work has been of great service in 
guiding me in the arrangement of my subjects, and in 
giving me courage to omit many names of the second 
or third rank which might be expected to appear in 
a history of French literature. In a volume like the 
present, selection is important, and I have erred more 
by inclusion than by exclusion. The limitation of space 
has made me desire to say no word that does not tend 
to bring out something essential or characteristic. 

M. Lanson has ventured to trace French literature to 
the present moment. I have thought it wiser to close 
my survey with the decline of the romantic movement. 
With the rise of naturalism a new period opens. The 
literature of recent years is rather a subject for current 
criticism than for historical study. 

I cannot say how often I have been indebted to the 
writings of M. Brunetiere, M. Faguet, M. Larroumet, 
M. Paul Stapfer, and other living critics ; to each of the 
volumes of Les Grands Ecrivains Francais, and to many 
of the volumes of the Classiques Populaires. M. Lintilhac's 



viii PREFACE 

edition of Merlet's Atudes Litteraires has also often served 
me. But to name my aids to study would be to fill some 
pages. 

While not unmindful of historical and social influences, 
I desire especially to fix my reader's attention on great 
individuals, their ideas, their feelings, and their art. The 
general history of ideas should, in the first instance, be 
discerned by the student of literature through his obser- 
vation of individual minds. 

That errors must occur where so many statements are 
made, I am aware from past experience; but I have taken 
no slight pains to attain accuracy. It must not be hastily 
assumed that dates here recorded are incorrect because 
they sometimes differ from those given in other books. 
For my errors I must myself bear the responsibility • 
but by the editorial care of Mr. Gosse, in reading the 
proof-sheets of this book, the number of such errors 
has been reduced. 

I would ask the reader to begin by noting the 
corrections set down in my list of errata. 

EDWARD DOWDEN. 
Dublin, June 1897. 



I 



CONTENTS 



BOOK THE FIRST — THE MIDDLE AGES 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. NARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY — THE NATIONAL EPIC — THE 

EPIC OF ANTIQUITY — ROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY . 3 
II. LYRICAL POETRY— FABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX — FABLIAUX 

—THE, ROMANCE OF THE ROSE ...... 24 

III. DIDACTIC LITERATURE — SERMONS — HISTORY . . . . 40 

- IV. LATEST MEDIAEVAL' POETS — THE DRAMA 58 

BOOK THE SECOND — THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 

I. RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION ...... Si 

II. FROM THE PLEIADE TO MONTAIGNE .96 

BOOK THE THIRD — THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



I. LITERARY FREEDOM AND LITERARY ORDER . 
II. THE FRENCH ACADEMY— PHILOSOPHY (DESCARTES)— RELIGION 
(PASCAL) ........ 

III. THE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE) 
IV. SOCIETY AND PUBLIC LIFE IN LETTERS . 
V. BOILEAU AND LA FONTAINE . . . , 

" VI. COMEDY AND TRAGEDY — MOLIERE — RACINE . 

VII. BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS— FENELON 
VIII. TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . 



. 131 



147 
l6o 
173 
183 
196 
219 
235 



x CONTENTS 

BOOK THE FOURTH — THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. MEMOIRS AND HISTORY — POETRY — THE THEATRE — THE NOVEL 25 1 

II. MONTESQUIEU — VAUVENARGUES — VOLTAIRE .... 273 

III. DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA — PHILOSOPHERS, ECONO- 

MISTS, CRITICS — BUFFON 294 

IV. ROUSSEAU — BEAUMARCHAIS — BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE — 

ANDRE CHENIER , . , , . , , . , 31I 

BOOK THE FIFTH— 1789-1850 

I. THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE — MADAME DE STAEL — 

CHATEAUBRIAND 335 

II. THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS 354 

III. POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 363 

IV. THE NOVEL 396 

V. HISTORY — LITERARY CRITICISM 4II 

BIBLIOGRAPHY # . . 429 

INDEX 437 



BOOK THE FIRST 

THE MIDDLE AGES 



BOOK THE FIRST 
THE MIDDLE AGES 

CHAPTER I 

NARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY— THE NATIONAL 
EPIC— THE EPIC OF ANTIQUITY— ROMANCES 
OF LOVE AND COURTESY 

The literature of the Middle Ages4& an expression of the 
spirit of -feudalism and of the genius of the Church. 
From the union of feudalism and Christianity arose 
the chivalric ideals, the new courtesy, the homage to 
woman. Abstract ideas, ethical, theological, and those 
of amorous metaphysics, were rendered through alle- 
gory into art. Against these high conceptions, and 
the overstrained sentiment connected with them, the 
positive intellect and the mocking temper of France 
reacted ; a literature of satire arose. By degrees the 
bourgeois spirit encroached upon and overpowered 
the chivalrre ideals. At length the mediaeval concep- 
tions were exhausted. / Literature dwindled as its sources 
were impoverished ; ingenuities and technical formalities 
replaced imagination. The minds of men were prepared 
to accept the new influences of the Renaissance and the 
Reformation. 



4 FRENCH LITERATURE 

I 
Narrative Religious Poetry 

The oldest monument of the French language is found 
in the Strasburg Oaths (842) ; the oldest French poem 
possessing literary merit is the Vic de Saint Alexis, of 
which a redaction belonging to.the middle of the eleventh 
century survives. The passion of piety and the passion 
of combat, the religious and the warrior motives, found 
early expression in literature ; from the first arose the 
Lives of Saints and other devout writings, from the second 
arose the chansons de geste. They grew side by side, and 
had a like manner of development. If one takes pre- 
cedence of the other, it is only because by the chances of 
time Saint Alexis remains to us, and the forerunners of 
the Chanson de Roland are lost. With each species of 
poetry cantilenes — short lyrico - epic poems — preceded 
the narrative form. Both the profane and what may be 
called the religious chanson de geste were sung or recited 
by the same jongleurs — men of a class superior to the 
vulgar purveyors of amusement. Gradually the poems 
of both kinds expanded in length, and finally prose nar- 
rative took the place of verse. 

The Lives of Saints are in the main founded on Latin 
originals ; the names of their authors are commonly 
unknown. Saint Alexis, a tale of Syriac origin, possibly 
the work of Tedbalt, a canon of Vernon, consists of 125 
stanzas, each of five lines, which are bound together 
by a single assonant rhyme. It tells of the chastity and 
poverty of the saint, who flies from his virgin bride, 
lives among beggars, returns unrecognised to his father's 



LIVES OF SAINTS 5 

house, endures the insults of the servants, and, dying 
at Rome, receives high posthumous honours ; finally, 
he is rejoined by his wife — the poet here adding to the 
legend — in the presence of God, among the company 
of the angels. Some of the sacred poems are derived 
from the Bible, rhymed versions of which were part 
of the jongleur's equipment ; some from the apocryphal 
gospels, or legends of Judas, of Pilate, of the Cross, or, 
again, from the life of the Blessed Virgin. The literary 
value of these is inferior to that of the versified Lives of 
the Saints. About the tenth century the marvels of 
Eastern hagiography became known in France, and gave 
a powerful stimulus to the devout imagination. A cer- 
tain rivalry existed between the claims of profane and 
religious literature, and a popular audience for narrative 
poems designed for edification was secured by their re- 
cital in churches. Wholly fabulous some of these are — 
as the legend of St. Margaret — but they were not on 
this account the less welcome or the less esteemed. In 
certain instances the tale is dramatically placed in the 
mouth of a narrator, and thus the way was in a measure 
prepared for the future mystery-plays. 

More than fifty of these Lives of Saints are known, 
composed generally in octosyllabic verse, and varying in 
length from some hundreds of lines to ten thousand. In 
the group which treats of the national saints of France, 
an element of history obscured by errors, extravagances, 
and anachronisms may be found. The purely legendary 
matter occupies a larger space in those derived from the 
East, in which the religious ideal is that of the her- 
mit life. The celebrated Barlaam et JoasapJi, in which 
Joasaph, son of a king of India, escaping from his 
father's restraints, fulfils his allotted life as a Christian 



6 FRENCH LITERATURE 

ascetic, is traceable to a Buddhist source. The narra- 
tives of Celtic origin — such as those of the Purgato 
of St. Patrick and the voyages of St. Brendan — a ; 
coloured by a tender mysticism, and sometimes charm 
us with a strangeness of adventure, in which a feeling 
for external nature, at least in its aspects of wonder, 
appears. The Celtic saints are not hermits of the 
desert, but travellers or pilgrims. Among the lives > v 
contemporary saints, by far the most remarkable is that 
of our English Becket by Gamier de Pont - Saintc 
Maxence. Gamier had himself known the archbishop 
he obtained the testimony of witnesses in England ; he 
visited the places associated with the events of Becket ■ 
life ; his work has high value as an historical document 
it possesses a personal accent, rare in such writings ; 
genuine dramatic vigour ; and great skill and harmonious 
power in its stanzas of five rhyming lines. 

A body of short poems, inspired by religious feeling 
and often telling of miracles obtained by the inte 
cession of the Virgin or the saints, is known as Contt 
pieux. Many of these were the work of Gautier de 
Coinci (i 177-1236), a Benedictine monk; he translates 
from Latin sources, but with freedom, adding matter of 
his own, and in the course of his pious narratives gives 
an image, far from flattering, of the life and manners of 
his own time. It is he who tells of the robber who, 
being accustomed to commend himself in his adventures 
to our Lady, was supported on the gibbet for three days 
by her white hands, and received his pardon ; and of 
the illiterate monk who suffered shame because he knew 
no more than his Ave Maria, but who, when dead, was 
proved a holy man by the five roses that came from 
his mouth in honour of the five letters of Maria's name; 



PIOUS TALES 7 

and of the nun who quitted her convent to lead a life of 
disorder, yet still addressed a daily prayer to the Virgin, 
and who, returning after long years, found that the 
Blessed Mary had filled her place, and that her absence 
was unknown. The collection known as Vies des Peres 
exhibits the same naivete of pious feeling and imagina- 
tion. Man is weak and sinful ; but by supernatural aid 
the humble are exalted, sinners are redeemed, and the 
suffering innocent are avenged. Even Theophile, the 
priest who sold his soul to the devil, on repentance 
receives back from the Queen of Heaven the very docu- 
ment by which he had put his salvation in pawn. The 
sinner {Chevalier an barillet) who endeavours for a year 
to fill the hermit's little cask at running streams, and 
endeavours in vain, finds it brimming the moment one 
tear of true penitence falls into the vessel. Most ex- 
quisite in its feeling is the tale of the Tombeur de Notre- 
Dame — a poor acrobat — -a jongleur turned monk — who 
knows not even the Pater noster or the Credo, and can 
only offer before our Lady's altar his tumbler's feats ; he 
is observed, and as he sinks worn out and faint before 
the shrine, the Virgin is seen to descend, with her angelic 
attendants, and to wipe away the sweat from her poor 
servant's forehead. If there be no other piety in such a 
tale as this, there is at least the piety of human pity. 



II 

The National Epic 

Great events and persons, a religious and national 
spirit, and a genius for heroic narrative being given, 
epic literature arises, as it were, inevitably. Short poems, 



8 FRENCH LITERATURE 

partly narrative, partly lyrical, celebrate victories or 
defeats, the achievements of conquerors or defenders, 
and are sung to relieve or to sustain the passion of the 
time. The French epopee had its origin in the national 
songs of the Germanic invaders of Gaul, adopted from 
their conquerors by the Gallo-Romans. With the bap- 
tism of Clovis at Reims, and the acceptance of Chris- 
tianity by the Franks (496), a national consciousness 
began to exist — a national and religious ideal arose. 
Epic heroes — Clovis, Clotaire, Dagobert, Charles Martel 
—became centres for the popular imagination ; an echo 
of the Dagobert songs is found in Floovent, a poem of 
the twelfth century ; eight Latin lines, given in the 
Vie de Saint Far on by Helgaire, Bishop of Meaux, 
preserve, in their ninth-century rendering, a fragment of 
the songs which celebrated Clotaire II. Doubtless 
more and more in these lost cantilenes the German 
element yielded to the French, and finally the two 
streams of literature — French and German — separated ; 
gradually, also, the lyrical element yielded to the epic, 
and the chanson de geste was developed from these 
songs. 

In Charlemagne, champion of Christendom against 
Islam, a great epic figure appeared ; on his person 
converged the epic interest ; he may be said to have 
absorbed into himself, for the imagination of the singers 
and the people, the persons of his predecessors, and 
even, at a later time, of his successors ; their deeds 
became Ms deeds, their fame was merged in his ; he 
stood forth as the representative of France. We may 
perhaps regard the ninth century as the period of the 
transformation" of the cantilenes into the chansons de 
geste ; in the fragment of Latin prose of the tenth 



THE HISTORICAL BASIS 9 

century — reduced to prose from hexameters, but not 
completely reduced — discovered at La Haye (and 
named after the place of its discovery), is found an 
epic episode of Carlovingian war, probably derived 
from a chanson de gcste of the preceding century. In 
each chanson the gesta, 1 the deeds or achievements of a 
heroic person, are glorified, and large as may be the 
element of invention in these poems, a certain histori- 
cal basis or historical germ may be found, with few 
exceptions, in each. Roland was an actual person, and 
a battle was fought at Roncevaux in 778. William of 
Orange actually encountered the Saracens at Villedaigne 
in 793. Renaud de Montauban lived and fought, not 
indeed against Charlemagne, but against Charles M artel. 
Ogier, Girard de Roussillon, Raoul de Cambrai, were not 
mere creatures of the fancy. Even when the narrative 
records no historical series of events, it may express their 
general significance, and condense into itself something 
of the spirit of an epoch. In the course of time, how- 
ever, fantasy made a conquest of the historical domain ; 
a way for the triumph of fantasy had been opened by 
the incorporation of legend into the narrative, with all its 
wild exaggerations, its reckless departures from truth, its 
conventional types of character, its endlessly -repeated 
incidents of romance — the child nourished by wild beasts, 
the combat of unrecognised father and son, the hero 
vulnerable only in one point, the vindication of the 
calumniated wife or maiden ; and by the over-labour 
of fantasy, removed far from nature and reality, the epic 
material was at length exhausted. 

The oldest surviving chanson de gcste is the SONG 
OF ROLAND, and it is also the best. The disaster of 
1 Gestcs meant (1) deeds, (2) their history, (3) the heroic family. 



io FRENCH LITERATURE 

Roncevaux, probably first sung in ccmtilenes, gave rise 
to other chansons, two of which, of earlier date than 
the surviving poem, can in a measure be reconstructed 
from the Chronicle of Turpin and from a Latin Carmen 
de proditione Guenpnis, These, however, do not detract 
from the originality of the noble work in our possession, 
some of the most striking episodes of which are not else- 
where found. The oldest manuscript is at Oxford, and 
the last line has been supposed to give the author's name 
— Touroude (Latinised " Turoldus ") — but this may have 
been the name of the jongleur who sang, or the tran- 
scriber who copied. The date of the poem lies between 
that of the battle of Hastings, 1066, where the minstrel 
Taillefer sang in other words the deeds of Roland, and 
the year 1099. The poet was probably a Norman, and 
he may have been one of the Norman William's followers 
in the invasion of England. 

More than any other poem, the Chanson de Roland 
deserves to be named the Iliad of the Middle Ages. On 
August 15, 778, the rearguard of Charlemagne's army, 
returning from a successful expedition to the north of 
Spain, was surprised and destroyed by Basque moun- 
taineers in the valley of Roncevaux. Among those 
who fell was Hrodland (Roland), Count of the march of 
Brittany. For Basques, the singers substituted a host 
of Saracens, who, after promise of peace, treacherously 
attack the Franks, with the complicity of Roland's enemy, 
the traitor Ganelon. By Roland's side is placed his com- 
panion-in-arms, Olivier, brave but prudent, brother of 
Roland's betrothed, la belle Aude, who learns her lover's 
death, and drops dead at the feet of Charlemagne. In 
fact but thirty-six years of age, Charlemagne is here a 
majestic old man, a la barbe fleurie, still full of heroic 



SONG OF ROLAND n 

vigour. Around him are his great lords — Duke Naime, 
the Nestor of this Iliad ; Archbishop Turpin, the warrior 
prelate ; Oger the Dane ; the traitor Ganelon. And 
overhead is God, who will send his angels to bear 
heavenwards the soul of the gallant Roland. The idea 
of the poem is at once national and religious — the 
struggle between France, as champion of Christendom, 
and the enemies of France and of God. Its spirit is that 
of the feudal aristocracy of the eleventh century. The 
characters are in some degree representative of general 
types, but that of Roland is clearly individualised ; the 
excess of soldierly pride which will not permit him, until 
too late, to sound his horn and recall Charlemagne to 
his aid, is a glorious fault. When all his comrades have 
fallen, he still continues the strife ; and when he dies, it 
is with his face to the retreating foe. His fall is not 
unavenged on the Saracens and on the traitor. The 
poem is written in decasyllabic verse — in all 4000 lines 
— divided into sections or laisses of varying length, the 
lines of each laisse being held together by a single 
assonance. 1 And such is the form in which the best 
chansons de geste are written. The decasyllabic line, 
derived originally from popular Latin verse, rhythmical 
rather than metrical, such as the Roman legionaries 
sang, is the favourite verse of the older chansons. The 
alexandrine, 2 first seen in the Pelerinage de Jerusalem of 
the early years of the twelfth century, in general in- 
dicates later and inferior work. The laisse, bound in 
one by its identical assonance, might contain five lines 

1 Assonance, i. e. vowel-rhyme, without an agreement of consonants. 

2 "Verse of twelve syllables, with cesura after the sixth accented syllable. 
In the decasyllabic line the cesura generally followed the fourth, but some- 
times the sixth, tonic syllable. 



12 FRENCH LITERATURE 

or five hundred. In chansons of late date the full 
rhyme often replaces assonance ; but inducing, as it 
did in unskilled hands, artificial and feeble expansions 
of the sense, rhyme was a cause which co-operated 
with other causes in the decline of this form of narrative 
poetry. 

Naturally the chansons which celebrated the achieve- 
ments of one epic personage or one heroic family fell 
into a group, and the idea of cycles of songs having 
arisen, the later poets forced many independent subjects 
to enter into the so-called cycle of the king (Charle- 
magne), or that of William of Orange, or that of Doon 
of Mayence. The second of these had, indeed, a genuine 
cyclic character : it told of the resistance of the south of 
France to the Mussulmans. The last cycle to develop 
was that of the Crusades. Certain poems or groups of 
poems may be distinguished as gestes of the provinces, 
including the Geste des Lorrains, that of the North 
{Raoul de Cambrai), that of Burgundy, and others. 1 
Among these may be placed the beautiful tale of Amis 
et Amiles, a glorification of friendship between man and 
man, which endures all trials and self-sacrifices. Other 
poems, again, are unconnected with any of these cycles ; 
and, indeed, the cyclic division is more a convenience of 
classification than a fact in the spontaneous development 
of this form of art. The entire period of the evolution 
of epic song extends from the tenth or eleventh to the 
fifteenth century, or, we might say, from the Chanson de 
Roland to the Chronique de Bertrand Daguesclin. The 
eleventh century produced the most admirable work ; 

1 The epopee composed in Provencal, sung but not transcribed, is wholly 
lost. The development of lyric poetry in the South probably checked the 
development of the epic. 



SPIRIT OF THE NATIONAL EPIC 



r 3 



in the twelfth century the chansons are more numerous, 
but nothing was written of equal merit with the Song of 
Ronald ; after the death of Louis VII. (1180) the old epic 
material was rehandled and beaten thin — the decadence 
was already in progress. 

The style in which the chansons de geste are written 
is something traditional, something common to the 
people and to the time, rather than characteristic of the 
individual authors. They show little of the art of ar- 
ranging or composing the matter so as to produce an 
unity of effect : the narrative straggles or condenses 
itself as if by accident ; skill in transitions is unknown. 
The study of character is rude and elementary : a man 
is either heroic or dastard, loyal or a traitor ; wholly 
noble, or absolutely base. Yet certain types of man- 
hood and womanhood are presented Avith power and 
beauty. The feeling for external nature, save in some 
traditional formulae, hardly appears. The passion for 
the marvellous is everywhere present : St. Maurice, St. 
George, and a shining company, mounted on white 
steeds, will of a sudden bear down the hordes of the 
infidel ; an angel stands glorious behind the throne of 
Charlemagne ; or in narrative of Celtic origin angels 
may be mingled with fays. God, the great suzerain, to 
whom even kings owe homage, rules over all ; Jesus and 
Mary are watchful of the soldiers of the cross ; Paradise 
receives the souls of the faithful. As for earth, there is 
no land so gay or so dear as la douce France. The 
Emperor is above all the servant and protector of the 
Church. As the influence of the great feudal lords in- 
creased, they are magnified often at the expense of the 
monarchy ; yet even when in high rebellion, they secretly 
feel the duty of loyalty. The recurring poetic epithet 



14 FRENCH LITERATURE 

and phrase of formula found in the chansons de geste 
often indicate rather than veil a defect of imagination. 
Episodes and adventures are endlessly repeated from 
poem to poem with varying circumstances — the siege, 
the assault, the capture, the duel of Christian hero and 
Saracen giant, the Paynim princess amorous of a fair 
French prisoner, the marriage, the massacre, and a score 
of other favourite incidents. 

The popularity of the French epopee extended be- 
yond France. Every country of Europe translated or 
imitated the chansons de geste. Germany made the 
fortunate choice of Roland and Aliscans. In England 
two of the worst examples, Fierabras and Otinel, were 
special favourites. In Norway the chansons were 
applied to the purpose of religious propaganda. Italy 
made the tales of Roland, Ogier, Renaud, her own. 
Meanwhile the national epopee declined in France ; a 
breath of scepticism touched and withered the leafage 
and blossom of imagination ; it even became possible 
to parody — as in Audigier — the heroic manner. The 
employment of rhyme in place of assonance, and of 
the alexandrine in place of the decasyllabic line, en- 
couraged what may be called poetical padding. The 
influence of the Breton romances diverted the chansons 
de geste into ways of fantasy ; " We shall never know," 
writes M. Leon Gautier, " the harm which the Round 
Table has done us." Finally, verse became a weariness, 
and was replaced by prose. The decline has progressed 
to a fall. 



THEBES AND TROY 15 

III 

The Epic of Antiquity 

Later to develop than the national epopee was that 
which formed the cycle of antiquity. Their romantic 
matter made the works of the Greco-Roman decadence 
even more attractive than the writings of the great 
classical authors to poets who would enter into rivalry 
with the singers of the chansons de geste. These 
poems, which mediaevalise ancient literature — poems 
often of portentous length — have been classified in 
three groups — epic romances, historical or pseudo- 
historical romances, and mythological tales, including 
the imitations of Ovid. The earliest in date of the 
first group (about 1 150 -1 155) is the Romance of 
Thebes, the work of an unknown author, founded 
upon a compendium of the Thebaid of Statius, pre- 
ceded by the story of GEdipus. It opened the way 
for the vast Romance of Troy, written some ten 
years later, by Benoit de Sainte-More. The chief 
sources of Benoit were versions, probably more or 
less augmented, of the famous records of the Trojan 
war, ascribed to the Phrygian Dares, an imaginary 
defender of the city, and the Cretan Dictys, one of 
the besiegers. Episodes were added, in which, on 
a slender suggestion, Benoit set his own inventive 
faculty to work, and among these by far the most 
interesting and admirable is the story of Troilus and 
Briseida, known better to us by her later name of 
Cressida. Through Boccaccio's // Filostrato this tale 
reached our English Chaucer, and through Chaucer it 



16 FRENCH LITERATURE 

gave rise to the strange, half-heroic, half-satirical play of 
Shakespeare. 

Again, ten years later, an unknown poet was adapting 
Virgil to the taste of his contemporaries in his Eneas, 
where the courtship of the Trojan hero and Lavinia is 
related in the chivalric manner. All these poems are 
composed in the swift octosyllabic verse ; the Troy 
extends to thirty thousand lines. While the names of 
the personages are classical, the spirit and life of the 
romances are wholly mediaeval : Troilus, and Hector, 
and .Eneas are conceived as if knights of the Middle 
Ages ; their wars and loves are those of gallant cheva- 
liers. The Romance of Julius Ccesar (in alexandrine 
verse), the work of a certain Jacot de Forest, writing 
in the second half of the thirteenth century, versifies, 
with some additions from the Commentaries of Caesar, an 
earlier prose translation by Jehan de Thuin (about 1240) 
of Lucan's Pharsalia — the oldest translation in prose of 
any secular work of antiquity. Caesar's passion for 
Cleopatra in the Romance is the love prescribed to 
good knights by the amorous code of the writer's day, 
and Cleopatra herself has borrowed something of the 
charm of Tristram's Iseult. 

If Julius Ccssar may be styled historical, the Roman 
d'Alexandre, a poem of twenty thousand lines (to the 
form of which this romance gave its name — " alexan- 
drine " verse), the work of Lambert le Tort and 
Alexandre de Bernay, can only be described as legen- 
dary. All — or nearly all — that was written during the 
Middle Ages in French on the subject of Alexander 
may be traced back to Latin versions of a Greek 
compilation, perhaps of the first century, ascribed to 
Callisthenes, the companion of Alexander on his Asiatic 



ROMANCE OF ALEXANDER 17 

expedition. 1 It is uncertain how much the Alexandre 
may owe to a Provencal poem on the same subject, 
written in the early years of the twelfth century, pro- 
bably by Alberic de Brianc,on, of which only a short 
fragment, but that of high merit, has been preserved. 
From his birth, and his education by Aristotle and the 
enchanter Nectanebus, to the division, as death ap- 
proaches, of his empire between his twelve peers, the 
story of Alexander is a series of marvellous adventures ; 
the imaginary wonders of the East, monstrous wild 
beasts, water-women, flower-maidens, Amazons, rain of 
fire, magic mountains, magic fountains, trees of the sun 
and of the moon, are introduced with a liberal hand. 
The hero is specially distinguished by the virtue of 
liberality; a jongleur who charms him by lays sung to 
the flute, is rewarded with the lordship of Tarsus, a 
worthy example for the twelfth-century patrons of the 
poet. The romance had a resounding fame. 

Of classical poets, Ovid ranked next to Virgil in the 
esteem of the Middle Ages. The mythology of paganism 
was sanctified by the assumption that it was an allegory 
of Christian mysteries, and thus the stories might first be 
enjoyed by the imagination, and then be expounded in 
their spiritual meaning. The Metamorphoses supplied 
Chretien de Troyes with the subject of his Philomena; 
other writers gracefully dealt with the tales of Piramus 
and of Narcissus. But the most important work founded 
upon Ovid was a versified translation of the Metamor- 
phoses (before 1305) by a Franciscan monk, Chretien 
Legouais de Sainte - Maure, with appended interpreta- 

1 Not quite all, for certain borrowings were made from the correspondence 
of Alexander with Dindimus, King of the Brahmans, and from the Alexandri 
tnagni iter ad Paradisum. 



1 8 FRENCH LITERATURE 

tions, scientific, historical, moral, or religious, of the 
mythological fables. Ovid's Art of Love, of which more 
than one rendering was made, aided in the formation 
or development of the mediaeval theory of love and the 
amorous casuistry founded upon that theory. 



IV 

Romances of Love and Courtesy 

Under the general title of the Jipope'e courtoise — the 
Epopee of Courtesy — may be grouped those romances 
which are either works of pure imagination or of un- 
certain origin, or which lead us back to Byzantine or 
to Celtic sources. They include some of the most 
beautiful and original poems of the Middle Ages. 
Appearing first about the opening of the twelfth cen- 
tury, later in date than the early chansons de geste, and 
contemporary with the courtly lyric poetry of love, 
they exhibit the chivalric spirit in a refined and graceful 
aspect ; their marvels are not gross wonders, but often 
surprises of beauty ; they are bright in colour, and varied 
in the play of life ; the passions which they interpret, and 
especially the passion of love, are felt with an exquisite 
delicacy and a knowledge of the workings of the heart. 
They move lightly in their rhymed or assonanced verse ; 
even when they passed into the form of prose they 
retained something of their charm. Breton harpers wan- 
dering through France and England made Celtic themes 
known through their lais ; the fame of King Arthur was 
spread abroad by these singers and by the History of 
Geoffrey of Monmouth. French poets welcomed the 
new matter of romance, infused into it their own chivalric 



ROMANCES OF TRISTAN 19 

spirit, made it a receptacle for their ideals of gallantry, 
courtesy, honour, grace, and added their own beautiful 
inventions. With the story of King Arthur was connected 
that of the sacred vessel — the graal — in which Joseph of 
Arimathea at the cross had received the Saviour's blood. 
And thus the rude Breton lais were elevated not only to 
a chivalric but to a religious purpose. 

The romances of Tristan may certainly be named as 
of Celtic origin. About 11 50 an Anglo-Norman poet, 
B£ROUL, brought together the scattered narrative of his 
adventures in a romance, of which a large fragment 
remains. The secret loves of Tristan and Iseut, their 
woodland wanderings, their dangers and escapes, are 
related with fine imaginative sympathy ; but in this ver- 
sion of the tale the fatal love-philtre operates only for a 
period of three years ; Iseut, with Tristan's consent, re- 
turns to her husband, King Marc ; and then a second 
passion is born in their hearts, a passion which is the 
offspring not of magic but of natural attraction, and at 
a critical moment of peril the fragment closes. About 
twenty years later (1170) the tale was again sung by an 
Anglo-Norman named Thomas. Here — again in a frag- 
ment — we read of Tristan's marriage, a marriage only in 
name, to the white-handed Iseut of Brittany, his fidelity 
of heart to his one first love, his mortal wound and deep 
desire to see the Queen of Cornwall, the device of the 
white or black sails to announce the result of his entreaty 
that she should come, his deception, and the death of his 
true love upon her lover's corpse. Early in the thirteenth 
century was composed a long prose romance, often re- 
handled and expanded, upon the same subject, in which 
Iseut and Tristan meet at the last moment and die in a 
close embrace. 



20 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Le Chevrefeuille (The Honeysuckle), one of several 
lais by a twelfth-century poetess, Marie, living in Eng- 
land, but a native of France, tells gracefully of an assig- 
nation of Tristan and Iseut, their meeting in the forest, 
and their sorrowful farewell. Marie de France wrote 
with an exquisite sense of the generosities and delicacy 
of the heart, and with a skill in narrative construction 
which was rare among the poets of her time. In Les 
Deux Amants, the manly pride of passion, which in a trial 
of strength declines the adventitious aid of a reviving 
potion, is rewarded by the union in death of the lover 
and his beloved. In Yonec and in Lanval tales of love 
and chivalry are made beautiful by lore of fairyland, in 
which the element of wonder is subdued to beauty. But 
the most admirable poem by Marie de France is unques- 
tionably her Eliduc. The Breton knight Eliduc is pas- 
sionately loved by Guilliadon, the only daughter of the 
old King of Exeter, on whose behalf he had waged battle. 
Her tokens of affection, girdle and ring, are received by 
Eliduc in silence ; for, though her passion is returned, he 
has left in Brittany, unknown to Guilliadon, a faithful 
wife. Very beautiful is the self-transcending love of the 
wife, who restores her rival from seeming death, and her- 
self retires into a convent. The lovers are wedded, and 
live in charity to the poor, but with a trouble at the heart 
for the wrong that they have done. In the end they 
part ; Eliduc embraces the religious life, and the two 
Joving women are united as sisters in the same abbey. 

Wace, in his romance of the Brut (1155), which renders 
into verse the Historia of Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes 
the earliest mention of the Round Table. Whether the 
Arthurian legends be of Celtic or of French origin — and 
the former seems probable — the French romances of 



CHRETIEN DE TROYES 21 

King Arthur owe but the crude material to Celtic 
sources ; they may be said to begin with Chretien de 
Troves, whose lost poem on Tristan was composed 
about 1 160. Between that date and 1175 he wrote his 
Ercc et Enide (a tale known to us through Tennyson's 
idyll of Geraint and Enid, derived from the Welsh 
Mabinogiori), Cligcs, Le Chevalier de la Charrette, Le Che- 
valier au Lion, and Perceval. In Cligcs the maidenhood 
of his beloved F<£nice, wedded in form to the Emperor 
of Constantinople, is guarded by a magic potion ; like 
Romeo's Juliet, she sleeps in apparent death, but, happier 
than Juliet, she recovers from her trance to fly with her 
lover to the court of Arthur. The Chevalier de la Charrette, 
at first unknown by name, is discovered to be Lancelot, 
who, losing his horse, has condescended, in order that 
he may obtain sight of Queen Guenievre, and in pas- 
sionate disregard of the conventions of knighthood, to 
seat himself in a cart which a dwarf is leading. After 
gallant adventures on the Queen's behalf, her indignant 
resentment of his unknightly conduct, estrangement, and 
rumours of death, he is at length restored to her favour. 1 
While Perceval was still unfinished, Chretien de Troyes 
died. It was continued by other poets, and through this 
romance the quest of the holy graal became a portion of 
the Arthurian cycle. A Perceval by ROBERT DE BORON, 
who wrote iri the early part of the thirteenth century, 
has been lost; but a prose redaction of the romance 
exists, which closes with the death of King Arthur. The 
great Lancelot in prose — a vast compilation — (about 
1220) reduces the various adventures of its hero and of 
other knights of the King to their definitive form; and 

1 Chretien de Troyes is the first poet to tell of the love of Lancelot for the 
Queen. 



22 FRENCH LITERATURE 

here the achievement of the graal is assigned, not to 
Perceval, but to the saintly knight Sir Galaad ; Arthur is 
slain in combat with the revolter Mordret ; and Lancelot 
and the Queen enter into the life of religion. Passion 
and piety are alike celebrated ; the rude Celtic legends 
have been sanctified. The earlier history of the sacred 
vase was traced by Robert de Boron in his Joseph 
d'Arimatkze (or the Saint- Graal), soon to be rehandled 
and developed in prose ; and he it was who, in his 
Merlin — also presently converted into prose — on sugges- 
tions derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, brought the 
great enchanter into Arthurian romance. By the middle 
of the thirteenth century the cycle had received its full 
development. Towards the middle of the fourteenth 
century, in Perceforest, an attempt was made to connect 
the legend of Alexander the Great with that of King- 
Arthur. 

Beside the so-called Breton romances, the E\popee 
courtoise may be taken to include many poems of Greek, 
of Byzantine, or of uncertain origin, such as the Roman 
de la Violette, the tale of a wronged wife, having much in 
common with that novel of Boccaccio with which Shake- 
speare's Cymbeline is connected, the Floire et Blanche- 
fleur; the Partenopeus de Blois, a kind of "Cupid and 
Psyche " story, with the parts of the lovers transposed, 
and others. In the early years of the thirteenth century 
the prose romance rivalled in popularity the romance 
in verse. The exquisite cha?ite-fable of Aucassin et 
Nicolette, of the twelfth century, is partly in prose, partly 
in assonanced laisses of seven-syllable verse. It is a 
story of the victory of love : the heir of Count Garin of 
Beaucaire is enamoured of a beautiful maiden of un- 
known birth, purchased from the Saracens, who proves 



SPIRIT OF THE ETOP£E COURTOISE 23 

to he daughter of the King of Carthage, and in the 
end the lovers are united. In one remarkable passage 
unusual sympathy is shown with the hard lot of the 
peasant, whose trials and sufferings are contrasted with 
the lighter troubles of the aristocratic class. 

In general the poems of the ApopSe courtoise exhibit 
much of the brilliant external aspect of the life of chivalry 
as idealised by the imagination ; dramatic situations are 
ingeniously devised; the emotions of the chief actors are 
expounded and analysed, sometimes with real delicacy; 
but in the conception of character, in the recurring inci- 
dents, in the types of passion, in the creation of marvel 
and surprise, a large conventional element is present. 
Love is independent of marriage, or rather the relation 
of wedlock excludes love in the accepted sense of the 
word ; the passion is almost necessarily illegitimate, and 
it comes as if it were an irresistible fate ; the first advance 
is often made by the woman ; but, though at war with 
the duty of wedlock, love is conceived as an ennobling 
influence, prompting the knight to all deeds of courage 
and self-sacrifice. Through the later translation of the 
Spanish Amadis des Gaules, something of the spirit of the 
mediaeval romances was carried into the chivalric and 
pastoral romances of the seventeenth century. 



CHAPTER II 

LYRICAL POETRY— FABLES, AND RENARD THE 
FOX — FABLIAUX — THE ROMANCE OF THE 
ROSE 

I 
Lyrical Poetry 

Long before the date of any lyrical poems that have 
come down to us, song and dance were a part of the 
life of the people of the North as well as of the South 
of France ; religious festivals were celebrated with a 
gaiety which had its mundane side ; love and malicious 
sport demanded an expression as well as pious joy. 
But in tracing the forms of lyrical verse anterior to the 
middle of the twelfth century, when the troubadour 
influence from the South began to be felt, we must be 
guided partly by conjecture, derived from the later 
poetry, in which — and especially in the refrains — earlier 
fragments have been preserved. 

The common characteristic which distinguishes the 
earlier lyrics is the presence in them of an objective 
element : they do not merely render an emotion ; they 
contain something of a story, or they suggest a situation. 
In this literature of sentiment, the singer or imagined 
singer is commonly a woman. The chanson d'histoire is 
also known as chanson de toile, for the songs were such 



VARIETIES OF SONG 25 

as suited "the spinsters and the knitters in the sun." 
Their inspiring motive was a girl's joy or grief in love ; 
they lightly outline or suggest the facts of a miniature 
drama of passion, and are aided by the repeated lyrical 
cry of a refrain. As yet, love was an affair for the 
woman ; it was she alone who made a confession of 
the heart. None of these poems are later than the 
close of the twelfth century. If the author be re- 
presented as actor or witness, the poem is rather a 
chanson a personnages than a chanson cThistoire ; most 
frequently it is a wife who is supposed to utter to 
husband, or lover, or to the poet, her complaint of the 
grievous servitude of marriage. The aube is, again, a 
woman's song, uttered as a parting cry when the lark 
at daybreak, or the watcher from his tower, warns her 
lover to depart. In the pastourelle — a form much culti- 
vated — a knight and a shepherdess meet ; love proposals 
are made, and find a response favourable or the reverse ; 
witnesses or companions may be present, and take a 
part in the action. The rondet is a dancing-song, in 
which the refrain corresponds with one of the move- 
ments of the dance ; a solo-singer is answered by the 
response of a chorus ; in the progress of time the 
rondet assumed the precise form of the modern triolet ; 
the theme was still love, at first treated seriously if not 
tragically, but at a later time in a spirit of gaiety. It 
is conjectured that all these lyrical forms had their 
origin in the festivities of May, when the return of 
spring was celebrated by dances in which women alone 
took part, a survival from the pagan rites of Venus. 

The poe'sie courtoise, moulded in form and inspired in 
its sentiment by the Provencal lyrics, lies within the 
compass of about one hundred and thirty years, from 



26 FRENCH LITERATURE 

1 150 to 1280. The Crusade of 1147 served, doubtless, as 
a point of meeting for men of the North and of the South ; 
but, apart from this, we may bear in mind the fact that 
the mediaeval poet wandered at will from country to 
country and from court to court. In 1137, Louis VII. 
married Eleonore of Aquitaine, who was an ardent ad- 
mirer of the poetry of courtesy. Her daughters inherited 
her taste, and themselves became patronesses of literature 
at the courts of their husbands, Henri de Champagne 
and Thibaut de Blois. From these courts, and that of 
Paris, this poetry of culture spread, and the earlier singers 
were persons of royal or noble rank and birth. The 
chief period of its cultivation was probably from 1200 to 
1240. During the half-century before its sudden cessa- 
tion, while continuing to be a fashion in courts and high 
society, it reached the wealthy bourgeoisie of the North. 
At Arras, where Jacques Bretel and Adam de la Halle, 
the hunchback, were eminent in song, it had its latest 
moments of splendour. 

It is essentially a poetry of the intellect and of the 
imagination, dealing with an elaborated theory of love ; 
the simple and spontaneous cry of passion is rarely 
heard. According to the amorous doctrine, love exists 
only between a married woman and the aspirant to her 
heart, and the art of love is regulated by a stringent 
code. Nothing can be claimed by the lover as a right ; 
the grace of his lady, who is placed far above him, must 
be sought as a favour ; for that favour he must qualify 
himself by all knightly virtues, and chief among these, as 
the position requires, are the virtues of discretion and 
patience. Hence the poet's ingenuities of adoration; 
hence often the monotony of artificial passion ; hence, 
also, subtleties and curiosities of expression, and sought- 



METRICAL FORMS 27 

out delicacies of style. In the earlier chansons some 
outbreak of instinctive feeling may be occasionally pre- 
sent ; but, as the amorous metaphysics developed, what 
came to be admired was the skill shown in manipulating 
a conventional sentiment ; the lady became an abstrac- 
tion of exalted beauty, the lover an interpreter of the 
theory of love ; the most personal of passions lost the 
character of individuality. Occasionally, as in the poems 
of the Chatelain de Couci, of Conon de Bethune, of 
Thibaut de Champagne, and of Adam de la Halle, 
something personal to the writer may be discerned ; 
but in general the poetry is that of a doctrine and of 
a school. 

In some instances the reputation of the lyrical trouvere 
was founded rather on his music than his verse. The 
metrical forms were various, and were gradually reduced 
to rule ; the ballette, of Provencal origin, was a more 
elaborate rondet, consisting of stanzas and refrain ; the 
estampie (stampon, to beat the ground with the foot) was 
a dancing -song ; the lyric lai, virtually identical with 
the descort, consisted of stanzas which varied in struc- 
ture ; the motet, a name originally applied to pieces 
of church music, was freer in versification, and occa- 
sionally dealt with popular themes. Among forms 
which cannot be included under the general title 
of chansons, are those in dialogue derived from the 
Provengal literature ; in the tenson or debat the two 
interlocutors put forth their opinions on what theme 
they may please; in the jeu parti one of the imagined 
disputants proposes two contrary solutions of some 
poetical or amorous question, and defends whichever 
solution his associate refuses to accept; the earliest jeu 
parti, attributed to Gace Brule" and Count Geoffroi of 



28 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Brittany, belongs to the second half of the twelfth 
century. The serventois were historical poems, and 
among them songs of the crusades, or moral, or re- 
ligious, or satirical pieces, directed against woman and 
the worship of woman. To these various species we 
should add the songs in honour of the saints, the sor- 
rows of the Virgin uttered at the foot of the cross, and 
other devout lyrics which lie outside the poesie courtoise. 
With the close of the thirteenth century this fashion of 
artificial love - lyric ceased : a change passed over the 
modes of thought and feeling in aristocratic society, 
and other forms took the place of those found in the 
poesie courtoise. 

II 

Fables and Renard the Fox 

The desire of ecclesiastical writers in the Middle Ages 
to give prominence to that part of classical literature 
which seemed best suited to the purpose of edification 
caused the fables of Phaedrus and Avianus to be re- 
garded with special honour. Various renderings from 
the thirteenth century onwards were made under the 
title of Isopets, 1 a name appropriated to collections of 
fables whether derived from ^Esop or from other sources. 
The twelfth-century fables in verse of Marie de France, 
founded on an English collection, include apologues 
derived not only from classical authors but from the 
tales of popular tradition. A great collection made 
about 1450 by Steinhcewel, a physician of Ulm, was 

1 The earlier " Romulus " was the name of the supposed author of the 
fables of Phsedrus, while that of Phredrus was still unknown. 



RENARD THE FOX 29 

translated into French, and became the chief source of 
later collections, thus appearing in the remote ancestry 
of the work of La Fontaine, The aesthetic value of the 
mediaeval fables, including those of Marie de France, is 
small ; the didactic intention was strong, the literary art 
was feeble. 

It is far otherwise with the famous beast-epic, the 
Roman de Renard. The cycle consists of many 
parts or "branches" connected by a common theme; 
originating and obscurely developed in the North, in 
Picardy, in Normandy, and the Isle of France, it 
suddenly appeared in literature in the middle of the 
twelfth century, and continued to receive additions 
and variations during nearly two hundred years. The 
spirit of the Renard poems is essentially bourgeois ; the 
heroes of the chansons de geste achieve their wondrous 
deeds by strength and valour ; Renard the fox is power- 
ful by skill and cunning ; the greater beasts — his chief 
enemy the wolf, and others — are no match for his 
ingenuity and endless resources ; but he is power- 
less against smaller creatures, the cock, the crow,J;he 
sparrow. The names of the personages are either sig- 
nificant names, such as Noble, the lion, and Chanticleer, 
the cock, or proper names, such as Isengrin, the wolf, 
Bruno, the bear, Tibert, the cat, Bernard, the ass ; and 
as certain of these proper names are found in the eastern 
district, it has been conjectured that a poet of Lotharingia 
in the tenth century first told in Latin the wars of fox 
and wolf, and that through translations the epic matter, 
derived originally from popular tradition, reached the 
trouveres of the North. While in a certain degree 
typical figures, the beasts are at the same time individual ; 
Renard is not the representative merely of a species ; he 



30 FRENCH LITERATURE 

is Renard, an individual, with a personality of his own ; 
Isengrin is not merely a wolf, he is the particular wolf 
Isengrin ; each is an epic individual, heroic and un- 
dying. Classical fable remotely exerted an influence 
on certain branches of the Romance ; but the vital 
substance of the epic is derived from the stores of 
popular tradition in which material from all quarters 
— the North of Europe and the Eastern world — had 
been gradually fused. In the artistic treatment of such 
material the chief difficulty lies in preserving a just 
measure between the beast-character and the imported 
element of humanity. Little by little the anthropo- 
morphic features were developed at the expense of veri- 
similitude ; the beast forms became a mere masquerade ; 
the romances were converted into a satire, and the satire 
lost rather than gained by the inefficient disguise. 

The earliest branches of the cycle have reached us only 
in a fragmentary way, but they can be in part recon- 
structed from the Latin Isengrimis of Nivard of Ghent 
(about 1 150), and from the German Reinhart Fucks, a 
rendering from the French by an Alsatian, Henri le 
Glichezare (about 1180). The wars of Renard and Isen- 
grin are here sung, and the failure of Renard's trickeries 
against the lesser creatures ; the spirit of these early 
branches is one of frank gaiety, untroubled by a didactic 
or satirical intention. In the branches of the second 
period the parody of human society is apparent ; some 
of the episodes are fatiguing in their details ; some are 
intolerably gross, but the poem known as the Branch of 
the Judgment is masterly— an ironical comedy, in which, 
without sacrifice of the primitive character of the beast- 
epic, the spirit of mediaeval life is transported into the 
animal world. Isengrin, the accuser of Renard before 



DECLINE OE RENARD ROMANCES 31 

King Noble and his court, is for a moment worsted ; the 
fox is vindicated, when suddenly enters a funeral cortege — 
Chanticleer and his four wives bear upon a litter the dead 
body of one of their family, the victim of Renard's wiles. 
The prayers for the dead are recited, the burial is cele- 
brated with due honour, and Renard is summoned to 
justice ; lie heaped upon lie will not save him ; at last he 
humbles himself with pious repentance, and promising to 
seek God's pardon over-sea, is permitted in his pilgrim's 
habit to quit the court. It is this Judgment of Renard 
which formed the basis of the Reineke Fuchs } known to 
us through the modernisation of Goethe. 

From the date of the Branch of the Judgment the 
Renard Romances declined. The Judgment was imitated 
by inferior hands, and the beasts were more and more 
nearly transformed to men ; the spirit of gaiety was re- 
placed by seriousness or gloom ; Renard ceased to be a 
light-footed and ingenious rogue ; he became a type of 
human fraud and cruelty ; whatever in society was false 
and base and merciless became a form of "renardie," 
and by " renardie " the whole world seemed to be ruled. 
Such is the temper expressed in Le Couronnement Renard, 
written in Flanders soon after 1250, a satire directed 
chiefly against the mendicant orders, in which the fox, 
turned friar for a season, ascends the throne. Renard 
le Nouveau, the work of a poet of Lille, Jacquemart Gelee, 
nearly half a century later, represents again the triumph 
of the spirit of evil ; although far inferior in execution to 
the Judgment, it had remarkable success, to which the 
allegory, wearying to a modern reader, no doubt contri- 
buted at a time when allegory was a delight. The last 
of the Renard romances, Renard le Contrefait, was com- 
posed at Troyes before 1328, by an ecclesiastic who had 



32 FRENCH LITERATURE 

renounced his profession and turned to trade. In his 
leisure hours he spun, in discipleship to Jean de Meun, 
his interminable poem, which is less a romance than an 
encyclopaedia of all the knowledge and all the opinions 
of the author. This latest Renard has a value akin to 
that of the second part of Le Roman de la Rose ; it is 
a presentation of the ideas and manners of the time by 
one who freely criticised and mocked the powers that be, 
both secular and sacred, and who was in sympathy with 
a certain movement or tendency towards social, political, 
and intellectual reform. 



Ill 

Fabliaux 

The name fabliaux is applied to short versified tales, 
comic in character, and intended rather for recitation 
than for song. Out of a far larger number about one 
hundred and fifty have survived. The earliest — Richeut 
■ — is of the year 1159. From the middle of the twelfth 
century, together with the heroic or sentimental poetry 
of feudalism, we find- this bourgeois poetry of realistic 
observation ; and even in the chansons de geste, in occa- 
sional comic episodes, something may be seen which is 
in close kinship with the fabliaux. Many brief humorous 
stories, having much in common under their various dis- 
guises, exist as part of the tradition of many lands and 
peoples. The theory which traces the French fabliaux 
to Indian originals is unproved, and indeed is unneces- 
sary. The East, doubtless, contributed its quota to the 
common stock, but so did other quarters of the globe ; 
such tales are ubiquitous and are undying, only the 



THE FABLIAUX 33 

particular form which they assume being determined 
by local conditions. 

The fabliaux, as we can study them, belong espe- 
cially to the north and north-east of France, and they 
continued to be put forth by their rhymers until about 
1340, the close of the twelfth and the beginning of the 
thirteenth century being the period of their greatest 
popularity. Simple and obvious jests sufficed to raise 
a laugh among folk disposed to good humour ; by de- 
grees something of art and skill was attained. The mis- 
fortunes of husbands supplied an inexhaustible store 
of merriment ; if woman and the love of woman were 
idealised in the romances, the fabliaux took their revenge, 
and exhibited her as the pretty traitress of a shameless 
comedy. If religion was honoured in the age of faith, 
the bourgeois spirit found matter of mirth in the 
adventures of dissolute priests and self-indulgent monks. 
Not a few of the fabliaux are cynically gross — ribald 
but not voluptuous. To literary distinction they made 
small pretence. It sufficed if the tale ran easily in the 
current speech, thrown into rhyming octosyllables ; but 
brevity, frankness, natural movement are no slight or 
common merits in mediaeval poetry, and something of 
the social life of the time is mirrored in these humorous 
narratives. 

To regard them as a satire of class against class, in- 
spired by indignation, is to misconceive their true char- 
acter ; they are rather miniature comedies or caricatures, 
in which every class in turn provides material for mirth. 
It may, however, be said that with the writers of the 
fabliaux to hold woman in scorn is almost an article of 
faith. Among these writers a few persons of secular 
rank or dignified churchmen occasionally appeared ; but 



34 FRENCH LITERATURE 

what we may call the professional rhymers and reciters 
were the humbler jongleurs addressing a bourgeois audi- 
ence — degraded clerics, unfrocked monks, wandering 
students, who led a bohemian life of gaiety alternating 
with misery. In the early part of the fourteenth century 
these errant jongleurs ceased to be esteemed ; the great 
lord attached a minstrel to his household, and poetry 
grew more dignified, more elaborate in its forms, more 
edifying in its intention, and in its dignity grew too often 
dull. Still for a time fabliaux were written ; but the age 
of the jongleurs was over. Virelais, rondeanx, ballades, 
chants royaux were the newer fashion ; and the old versi- 
fied tale of mirth and ribaldry was by the middle of 
the century a thing of the past. 



IV 
The Romance of the Rose 

The most extraordinary production in verse of the 
thirteenth century is undoubtedly Le Roman de la Rose, 
It is indeed no single achievement, but two very re- 
markable poems, written at two different periods, by 
two authors whose characters and gifts were not only 
alien, but opposed — two poems which reflect two dif- 
ferent conditions of society. Of its twenty-two thousand 
octosyllabic lines, upwards of four thousand are the work 
of Guillaume DE Lorris ; the remainder is the work of 
a later writer, Jean de Meun. 

Lorris is a little town situated between Orleans and 
Montargis. Here, about the year 1200, the earlier poet 
was born. He was a scholar, at least as far as knowledge 
of Latin extends, and learned above all in the lore of 



THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE 35 

love. He died young, probably before 1230, and during 
the five years that preceded his death the first part of 
Le Roman de la Rose was composed. Its subject is an 
allegorised tale of love, his own or imagined, transferred 
to the realm of dreams. The writer would fain win the 
heart of his beloved, and at the same time he would 
instruct all amorous spirits in the art of love. He is 
twenty years of age, in the May-morn of youth. He 
has beheld his beautiful lady, and been charmed by her 
fairness, her grace, her courtesy ; she has received him 
with gentleness, but when he declares his love she grows 
alarmed. He gains at last the kiss which tells of her 
affection ; but her parents intervening, throw obstacles 
between the lovers. Such, divested of ornament, alle- 
gory, and personification, is the theme of the poem. 

To pluck the rose in the garden of delight is to win 
the maiden ; her fears, her virgin modesty and pride, 
her kindness, her pity, are the company of friends or 
foes by whom the rose is surrounded ; and to harmonise 
the real and the ideal, all the incidents are placed in the 
setting of a dream. Wandering one spring morning by 
the river-banks, the dreamer finds himself outside the 
walls of a fair orchard, owned by Deduit (Pleasure), of 
which the portress is Oiseuse (Idleness) ; on the walls 
are painted figures of Hatred, Envy, Sadness, Old Age, 
Poverty, and other evil powers ; but unterrified by these, 
he enters, and finds a company of dancers on the turf, 
among whom is Beauty, led by the god of Love. Sur- 
rounded by a thorny hedge is the rosebud on which 
all his desire now centres. He is wounded by the 
arrows of Love, does homage to the god, and learns 
his commandments and the evils and the gains of love. 
Invited by , Bel-Accueil, the son of Courtoisie, to ap- 



36 FRENCH LITERATURE 

proach the rose, he is driven back by Danger and his 
companions, the guardians of the blossom. Raison 
descends from a tower and discourses against the 
service of Love ; Ami offers his consolations ; at length 
the lover is again admitted to the flowery precinct, 
finds his rosebud half unclosed, and obtains the joy of 
a kiss. But Jealousy raises an unscalable wall around 
the rose ; the serviceable Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and 
with a long lament of the lover, the poem (line 4068) 
closes. 

Did Guillaume de Lorris ever complete his poem, or 
did he die while it was still but half composed ? We 
may conjecture that it wanted little to reach some 
denouement — perhaps the fulfilment of the lover's 
hopas ; and it is not impossible that a lost fragment 
actually brought the love-tale to its issue. But even 
if the story remained without an end, we possess in 
Guillaume's poem a complete mediaeval Art of Love ; 
and if the amorous metaphysics are sometimes cold, 
conventional, or laboured, we have gracious allegories, 
pieces of brilliant description, vivid personifications, and 
something of ingenious analysis of human passion. 
Nevertheless the work of this Middle-Age disciple of 
Ovid and of Chretien de Troyes owes more than half 
its celebrity to the continuation, conceived in an entirely 
opposite spirit, by his successor, Jean de Meun. 

The contrast is striking : Guillaume de Lorris was a 
refined and graceful exponent of the conventional doc- 
trine of love, a seemly celebrant in the cult of woman, 
an ingenious decorator of accepted ideas ; Jean de Meun 
was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardent speculator 
in social, political, and scientific questions, one who cared 
nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn. 



JEAN DE MEUN 37 

Guillaume addressed an aristocratic audience, imbued 
with the sentiments of chivalry ; Jean was a bourgeois, 
eager to instruct, to arouse, to inflame his fellows in a 
multitude of matters which concerned the welfare of 
their lives. He was little concerned for the lover and 
his rose, but was deeply interested in the condition of 
society, the corruptions of religion, the advance of know- 
ledge. He turned from ideals which seemed spurious 
to reason and to nature ; he had read widely in Latin 
literature, and found much that suited his mood and 
mind in Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophies and in 
the De Planctu Natures of the " universal doctor " of the 
twelfth century, Alain de Lille, from each of which he 
conveyed freely into his poem. Of his life we know 
little ; Jean Clopinel was born at Meun on the Loire 
about the year 1240 ; he died before the close of 1305 ; 
his continuation of Guillaume's Roman was made about 
1270. His later poems, a Testament, in which he warned 
and exhorted his contemporaries of every class, the 
Codicille, which incited to almsgiving, and his numerous 
translations, prove the unabated energy of his mind in 
his elder years. 

The rose is plucked by the lover in the end ; but lover 
and rose are almost forgotten in Jean's zeal in setting 
forth his views of life, and in forming an encyclopaedia 
of the knowledge of his time. Reason discourses on the 
dangers of passion, commends friendship or universal 
philanthropy as wiser than love, warns against the in- 
stability of fortune and the deceits of riches, and sets 
charity high above justice ; if love" be commendable, it 
is as the device of nature for the continuation of the 
species. The way to win woman and to keep her loyalty 
is now the unhappy way of squandered largess ; formerly 



38 FRENCH LITERATURE 

it was not so in the golden age of equality, before pri- 
vate property was known, when all men held in common 
the goods of the earth, and robber kings were evils of 
the future. The god of Love and his barons, with the 
hypocrite monk Faux-Semblant — a bitter satirist of the 
mendicant orders — besiege the tower in which Bel- 
Accueil is imprisoned, and by force and fraud an 
entrance is effected. The old beldame, who watches 
over the captive, is corrupted by promises and gifts, and 
frankly exposes her own iniquities and those of her sex. 
War is waged against the guardians of the rose, Venus, 
sworn enemy of chastity, aiding the assailants. Nature, 
devoted to the continuance of the race, mourns over 
the violation of her laws by man, unburdens herself of 
all her scientific lore in a confession to her chaplain 
Genius, and sends him forth to encourage the lover's 
party with a bold discourse against the crime of virginity. 
The triumph of the lover closes the poem. 

The graceful design of the earlier poet is disregarded; 
the love-story becomes a mere frame for setting forth the 
views of Jean de Meun, his criticism of the chivalric 
ideal, his satire upon the monkish vices, his revolutionary 
notions respecting property and government, his advanced 
opinions in science, his frank realism as to the relations 
of man and woman. He possesses all the learning of his 
time, and an accomplished judgment in the literature 
which he had studied. He is a powerful satirist, and 
passages of narrative and description show that he had a 
poet's feeling for beauty ; he handles the language with 
the strength and skiH of a master. On the other hand, 
he lacks all sense of proportion, and cannot shape an 
imaginative plan ; his prolixity wearies the reader, and it 
cannot be denied that as a moral reformer he some- 



INFLUENCE OF THE ROMANCE 39 

times topples into immorality. The success of the poem 
was extraordinary, and extended far beyond France. 
It was attacked and defended, and up to the time of 
Ronsard its influence on the progress of literature — en- 
couraging, as it did, to excess the art of allegory and 
personification — if less than has commonly been alleged, 
was unquestionably important. 



CHAPTER III 

DIDACTIC LITERATURE— SERMONS— HISTORY 

I 

Didactic Literature 

The didactic literature, moral and scientific, of the Middle 
Ages is abundant, and possesses much curious interest, 
out it is seldom original in substance, and seldom valu- 
able from the point of view of literary style. In great 
part it is translated or derived from Latin sources. The 
writers were often clerks or laymen who had turned 
from the vanities of youth — fabliau or romance — and 
now aimed at edification or instruction. Science in the 
hands of the clergy must needs be spiritualised and 
moralised ; there were sermons to be found in stones, 
pious allegories in beast and bird ; mystic meanings in 
the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, 
in the game of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to 
religious uses. The earliest versified Bestiary, which is 
also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of 
Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified from the 
Latin Physiologus, itself a translation from the work of an 
Alexandrian Greek of the second century. In its symbolic 
zoology the lion and the pelican are emblems of Christ ; 
the unicorn is God; the crocodile is the devil; the stones 
" turrobolen," which blaze when they approach each 



SCIENCE, MORALS, AND MANNERS 41 

other, are representative of man and woman. A Bestiaire 
d 'Amour was written by Richard de Fournival, in which 
the emblems serve for the interpretation of human love 
A Lapidary, with a medical — not a moral — purpose, b) 
Marbode, Bishop of Rennes, was translated more thar 
once into French, and had, indeed, an European fame. 

Bestiaries and Lapidaries form parts of the vast ency- 
clopedias, numerous in the thirteenth century, which 
were known by such names as Image dn Monde, Mappe- 
monde, Miroir du Monde. Of these encyclopaedias, the 
only one which has a literary interest is the Tresor (1265), 
by Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, who wrote in French 
in preference to his native Italian. In it science escapes 
not wholly from fantasy and myth, but at least from the 
allegorising spirit; his ethics and rhetoric are derived 
from Latin originals ; his politics are his own. The 
Somme des Vices et des Vertus, compiled in 1279 by 
Friar Lorens, is a well-composed tresor of religion and 
morals. Part of its contents has become familiar to us 
through the Canterbury discourse of Chaucer's parson. 
The moral experience of a man of the world is summed 
up in the prose treatise on "The Four Ages of Man," 
by Philippe de Novare, chancellor of Cyprus. With 
this edifying work may be grouped the so-called Chas- 
tiements, counsels on education and conduct, designed 
for readers in general or for some special class — ■ 
women, children, persons of knightly or of humble 
rank ; studies of the virtues of chivalry, the rules of 
courtesy and of manners. 1 Other writings, the Atats du 

1 Two works of the fourteenth century, interesting in the history of manners 
and ideas, may here be mentioned— the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour-Landry 
(1372), composed for the instruction of the writer's daughters, and the Mhtagier 
de Paris, a treatise on domestic economy, written by a Parisian bourgeois for 
the use of his young wife. 



42 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Monde, present a view of the various classes of society 
from a standpoint ethical, religious, or satirical, with 
warnings and exhortations, which commonly conclude 
with a vision of the last judgment and the pains of hell. 
With such a scene of terror closes the interesting Pohne 
Moral of Etienne de Fougeres, in which the life of St. 
Moses, the converted robber, serves as an example to 
monks, and that of the converted Thai's to ladies who 
are proud of their beauty. Its temper of moderation 
contrasts with the bitter satire in the Bible by Guiot de 
Provins, and with many shorter satirical pieces directed 
against clerical vices or the infirmities of woman. The 
Besant de Dieu, by Guillaume le Clerc, a Norman poet 
(1227), preaches in verse, with eloquence and imaginative 
power, the love of God and contempt of the world from 
the texts of two Scripture parables — that of the Talents 
and that of the Bridegroom ; Guillaume anticipates the 
approaching end of the world, foreshown by wars, 
pestilence, and famine, condemns in the spirit of 
Christian charity the persecution of the Albigenses, and 
mourns over the shame that has befallen the Holy 
Sepulchre. 

Among the preacher poets of the thirteenth century 
the most interesting personally is the minstrel Rutebeuf, 
who towards the close of his gay though ragged life turned 
to serious thoughts, and expressed his penitent feelings 
with penetrating power. Rutebeuf, indeed — the Villon 
of his age — deployed his vivid and ardent powers in many 
directions, as a writer of song and satire, of allegory, 
of fabliaux, of drama. On each and all he impressed 
his own personality ; the lyric note, imaginative fire, 
colour, melody, these were gifts that compensated the 
poet's poverty, his conjugal miseries, his lost eye, his 



RELIGIOUS ALLEGORY 43 

faithless friends, his swarming adversaries. The per- 
sonification of vices and virtues, occasional in the 
Bcsant and other poems, becomes a system in the 
Songe cTEnfer, a pilgrim's progress to hell, and the Voie 
de Paradis } a pilgrim's progress to heaven, by Raoul 
de Houdan (after 1200). The Pclerinage de la Vie 
Hamaine — another "way to Paradise"; the Pclerinage 
de I'Ame — a vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven ; 
and the Pclerinage de Jesus-Christ — a narrative of the 
Saviour's life, by Guillaume de Digulleville (fourteenth 
century), have been imagined by some to have been 
among the sources of Bunyan's allegories. Human life 
may be represented in one aspect as a pilgrimage ; 
in another it is a knightly encounter ; there is a great 
strife between the powers of good and evil ; in Le 
Tornoiement Antecrist, hy Huon de Meri, Jesus and the 
Knights of the Cross, among whom, besides St. Michael, 
St. Gabriel, Confession, Chastity, and Alms, are Arthur, 
Launcelot, and Gawain, contend against Antichrist and 
the infernal barons — Jupiter, Neptune, Beelzebub, and a 
crowd of allegorical personages. But the battles and 
debats of a chivalric age were not only religious ; there 
are battles of wine and water, battles of fast and feasting, 
battles of the seven arts. A disputation between the 
body and the soul, a favourite subject for separate treat- 
ment by mediaeval poets, is found also in one of the many 
sermons in verse ; the Debat des Trois Morts et des Trois 
Vifs recalls the subject of the memorable painting in 
the Campo Santo at Pisa. 



44 FRENCH LITERATURE 

II 

Sermons 

The Latin sermons of the Middle Ages were count- 
less; but it is not until Gerson and the close of the 
fourteenth century that we find a series of discourses by 
a known preacher written and pronounced in French. 
It is maintained that these Latin sermons, though pre- 
pared in the language of the Church, were . delivered, 
when addressed to lay audiences, in the vernacular, and 
that those composite sermons in the macaronic style, that 
is, partly in French, partly in Latin, which appear in the 
thirteenth century and are frequent in the fifteenth, were 
the work of reporters or redactors among the auditory. 
On the other hand, it is argued that both Latin and French 
sermons were pronounced as each might seem suitable, 
before the laity, and that the macaronic style was actually 
practised in the pulpit. Perhaps we may accept the 
opinion that the short and simple homilies designed for 
the people, little esteemed as compositions, were rarely 
thought worthy of preservation in a Latin form; those 
discourses which remain to us, if occasionally used 
before an unlearned audience, seem to have been 
specially intended for clerkly hearers. The sermons of 
St. Bernard, which have been preserved in Latin and in 
a French translation of the thirteenth century, were cer- 
tainly not his eloquent popular improvisations ; they 
are doctrinal, with crude or curious allegorisings of 
Holy Scripture. Those of Maurice de Sully, Arch- 
bishop of Paris, probably also translated from the Latin, 
are simpler in manner and more practical in their teach- 



MEDIEVAL SERMONS 45 

ing ; but in these characteristics they stand apart from 
the other sermons of the twelfth century. 

It was not until the mendicant orders, Franciscans and 
Dominicans, began their labours that preaching, as pre- 
served to us, was truly laicised and popularised. During 
the thirteenth century the work of the pulpit came to be 
conceived as an art which could be taught ; collections 
of anecdotes and illustrations — exempla — for the enliven- 
ing of sermons, manuals for the use of preachers were 
formed ; rules and precepts were set forth ; themes for 
popular discourse were proposed and enlarged upon, 
until at length original thought and invention ceased ; 
the preacher's art was turned into an easy trade. The 
effort to be popular often resulted in pulpit buffoonery. 
When Gerson preached at court or to the people towards 
the close of the fourteenth century, gravely exhorting 
high and low to practical duties, with tender or passionate 
appeals to religious feeling, his sermons were noble excep- 
tions to the common practice. And the descent from 
Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and 
steep. The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse 
from burlesque mirth or bitter invective to gross terrors, 
in which death and judgment, Satan and hell-fire were 
largely displayed. The sermons of Michel Menot and 
Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure of 
sin, sometimes trivial or grotesque, sometimes pedantic 
in their exhibition of learning, have at least an historical 
value in presenting an image of social life in the fifteenth 
century. 

A word must be said of the humanism which preceded 
the Renaissance. Scholars and students there were in 
France two hundred years before the days of Erasmus 
and of Bud£ ; but they were not scholars inspired by 



46 FRENCH LITERATURE 

genius, and they contented themselves with the task of 
translators, undertaken chiefly with a didactic purpose. 
If they failed to comprehend the spirit of antiquity, 
none the less they did something towards quickening 
the mind of their own time and rendering the French 
language less inadequate to the intellectual needs of a 
later age. All that was then known of Livy's history 
was rendered into French in 1356 by the friend of 
Petrarch, Pierre Bercuire. On the suggestion of Charles 
V., Nicole Oresme translated from the Latin the Ethics, 
Politics, and Economics of Aristotle. It was to please the 
king that the aged Raoul de Presles prepared his version 
of St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, and Denis Foulechat, 
with very scanty scholarship, set himself to render the 
Polycraticus of John of Salisbury. The dukes of Bour- 
bon, of Berry, of Burgundy, were also patrons of letters 
and encouraged their translators. We cannot say how 
far this movement of scholarship might have progressed, 
if external conditions had favoured its development. In 
Jean de Montreuil, secretary of Charles VI., the devoted 
student of Cicero, Virgil, and Terence, we have an 
example of the true humanist before the Renaissance. 
But the seeming dawn was a deceptive aurora ; the early 
humanism of France was clouded and lost in the tempests 
of the Hundred Years' War. 



Ill 

History 

While the mediaeval historians, compilers, and ab- 
breviators from records of the past laboured under all 
the disadvantages of an age deficient in the critical spirit, 



HISTORY IN VERSE 47 

and produced works of little value either for their sub- 
stance or their literary style, the chroniclers, who told 
the story of their own times, Villehardouin, Joinville, 
Froissart, Commines, and others, have bequeathed to 
us, in living pictures or sagacious studies of events and 
their causes, some of the chief treasures of the past. 
History at first, as composed for readers who knew 
no Latin, was comprised in those chansons de geste which 
happened to deal with matter that was not wholly — or 
almost wholly — the creation of fancy. Narrative poems 
treating of contemporary events came into existence with 
the Crusades, but of these the earliest have not survived, 
and we possess only rehandlings of their matter in the 
style of romance. What happened in France might be 
supposed to be known to persons of intelligence ; what 
happened in the East was new and strange. But Eng- 
land, like the East, was foreign soil, and the Anglo-Nor- 
man trouveres of the eleventh and twelfth centuries busied 
themselves with copious narratives in rhyme, such as 
Gaimar's Estorie des Engles (1151), Wace's Brut (1155) and 
his Roman de Rou, which, if of small literary importance, 
remain as monuments in the history of the language. 
The murder of Becket called forth the admirable life 
of the saint by Gamier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, founded 
upon original investigations; Henry II.'s conquest of 
Ireland was related by an anonymous writer ; his vic- 
tories over the Scotch (1173-1174) were strikingly de- 
scribed by Jordan Fantosme. But by far the most 
remarkable piece of versified history of this period, re- 
markable alike for its historical interest and its literary 
merit, is the Vie de Guillaume le Marechal — William, 
Earl of Pembroke, guardian of Henry III. — a poem of 
nearly twenty thousand octosyllabic lines by an un- 



48 FRENCH LITERATURE 

known writer, discovered by M. Paul Meyer in the 
library of Sir Thomas Phillipps. "The masterpiece of 
Anglo-Norman historiography," writes M. Langlois, " is 
assuredly this anonymous poem, so long forgotten, and 
henceforth classic." 

Prose, however, in due time proved itself to be the 
fitting medium for historical narrative, and verse was 
given over to the extravagances of fantasy. Compilations 
from the Latin, translations from the pseudo-Turpin, 
from Geoffrey of Monmouth, from Sallust, Suetonius, 
and Caesar were succeeded by original record and 
testimony. Geoffroy de Villehardouin, born be- 
tween 1 150 and 1 1 64, Marshal of Champagne in 
1 191, was appointed eight years later to negotiate 
with the Venetians for the transport of the Crusaders 
to the East. He was probably a chief agent in 
the intrigue which diverted the fourth Crusade from 
its original destination — the Holy Land — to the assault 
upon Constantinople. In the events which followed he 
had a prominent part; before the close of 1213 Ville- 
hardouin was dead. During his last years he dictated 
the unfinished Memoirs known as the Conquete de Con- 
stantinople,^ which relate the story of his life from 1198 
to 1207. Villehardouin is the first chronicler who im- 
presses his own personality on what he wrote : a brave 
leader, skilful in resource, he was by no means an 
enthusiast possessed by the more extravagant ideas of 
chivalry ; much more was he a politician and diplomatist, 
with material interests well in view ; not, indeed, devoid 
of a certain imaginative wonder at the marvels of the 
East ; not without his moments of ardour and excite- 
ment ; deeply impressed with the feeling of feudal loyalty, 
the sense of the bond between the suzerain and his 



VILLEHARDOUIN 49 

vassal ; deeply conscious of the need of discipline in 
great adventures ; keeping in general a cool head, which 
could calculate the sum of profit and loss. 

It is probable that Villehardouin knew too much of 
iffairs, and was too experienced a man of the world to 
je quite frank as a historian : we can hardly believe, 
as he would have us, that the diversion of the crusad- 
ing host from its professed objects was unpremedi- 
tated ; we can perceive that he composes his narrative 
so as to form an apology ; his recital has been justly 
described as, in part at least, "un memoire justificatif." 
Nevertheless, there are passages, such as that which 
describes the first view of Constantinople, where Ville- 
hardouin's feelings seize upon his imagination, and, as 
it were, overpower him. In general he writes with a 
grave simplicity, sometimes with baldness, disdaining 
ornament, little sensible to colour or grace of style ; 
but by virtue of his clear intelligence and his real 
grasp of facts his chronicle acquires a certain literary 
dignity, and when his words become vivid we know 
that it is because he had seen with inquisitive eyes 
and felt with genuine ardour. Happily for students of 
history, while Villehardouin presents the views of an 
aristocrat and a diplomatist, the incidents of the same 
extraordinary adventure can be seen, as they struck a 
simple soldier, in the record of Robert de Clari, which 
may serve as a complement and a counterpoise to the 
chronicle of his more illustrious contemporary. The un- 
finished Histoire de V Empereur Henri, which carries on 
the narrative of events for some years subsequent to 
those related by Villehardouin, the work of Henri de 
Valenciennes, is a prose redaction of what had originally 
formed a chanson de geste. 



50 FRENCH LITERATURE 

The versified chronicle or history in the thirteenth cen- 
tury declined among Anglo-Norman writers, but was 
continued in Flanders and in France. Prose translations 
and adaptations of Latin chronicles, ancient and modern, 
were numerous, but the literary value of many of these is 
slight. In the Abbey of Saint-Denis a corpus of national 
history in Latin had for a long while been in process of for- 
mation. Utilising this corpus and the works from which 
it was constructed, one of the monks of the Abbey — per- 
haps a certain Primat — compiled, in the second half of 
the century, a History of France in the vernacular — the 
Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis — with which later addi- 
tions were from time to time incorporated, until under 
Charles V. the Grandes Chroniques de France attained their 
definitive form. 1 Far more interesting as a literary com- 
position is the little work known as Re'cits d'un M/tnestrel 
de Reims (1260), a lively, graceful, and often dramatic 
collection of traditions, anecdotes, dialogues, made rather 
for the purposes of popular entertainment than of formal 
instruction, and expressing the ideas of the middle classes 
on men and things. Forgotten during several centuries, 
it remains to us as one of the happiest records of the 
mediaeval spirit. 

But among the prose narratives to which the thirteenth 
century gave birth, the Histoire de Saint Louis, by Jean 
de Joinville, stands pre-eminent. Joinville, born about 
1224, possessed of such literary culture as could be gained 
at the Court of Thibaut IV. of Champagne, became a 
favoured companion of the chivalric and saintly Louis 
during his six years' Crusade from 1248 to 1254. The 
memory of the King remained the most precious pos- 

1 The Chroniques were continued by lay writers to the accession of 
Louis XI. 



JOINVILLE 5 1 

session of his follower's elder years. It is probable 
that soon after 1272 Joinville prepared an autobio- 
graphic fragment, dealing with that period of his youth 
which had been his age of adventure. When he was 
nearly eighty, Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philippe le Bel, 
invited the old seneschal to put on record the holy 
words and good deeds of Saint Louis. Joinville willingly 
acceded to the request, and incorporating the fragment 
of autobiography, in which the writer appeared in close 
connection with his King, he had probably almost com- 
pleted his work at the date of Queen Jeanne's death 
(April 2, 1305); to her son, afterwards Louis X., it was 
dedicated. His purpose was to recite the pious words 
and set forth the Christian virtues of the royal Saint in 
one book of the History, and to relate his chivalric actions 
in the other ; but Joinville had not the art of construc- 
tion, he suffered from the feebleness of old age, and he 
could not perfectly accomplish his design ; in 1317 
Joinville died. Deriving some of his materials from 
other memoirs of the King, especially those by Geoffroy 
de Beaulieu and Guillaume de Nangis, he drew mainly 
upon his own recollections. Unhappily the most autho- 
ritative manuscripts of the Histoire de Saint Louis have 
been lost ; we possess none earlier than the close of 
the fourteenth century ; but by the learning and skill 
of a modern editor the text has been substantially 
established. 

We must not expect from Joinville precision of chrono- 
logy or exactitude in the details of military operations. 
His recollections crowd upon him ; he does not marshal 
them by power of intellect, but abandons himself to the 
delights of memory. He is a frank, amiable, spirited 
talker, who has much to tell ; he succeeds in giving us 



52 FRENCH LITERATURE 

two admirable portraits — his own and that of the King ; 
and unconsciously he conveys into his narrative both the 
chivalric spirit of his time, and a sense of those prosaic 
realities which tempered the ideals of chivalry. What 
his eyes had rested on lives in his memory, with all its 
picturesque features, all its lines and colours, undimmed 
by time ; and his curious eyes had been open to things 
great and small. He appears as a brave soldier, but, he 
confesses, capable of mortal fear ; sincerely devout, but 
not made for martyrdom ; zealous for his master's cause, 
but not naturally a chaser of rainbow dreams ; one who 
enjoys good cheer, who prefers his wine unallayed with 
water, who loves splendid attire, who thinks longingly of 
his pleasant chateau, and the children awaiting his return ; 
one who will decline future crusading, and who believes 
that a man of station may serve God well by remaining 
in his own fields among his humble dependants. But 
Joinville felt deeply the attraction of a nature more under 
the control of high, ideal motives than was his own ; he 
would not himself wash the feet of the poor ; he would 
rather commit thirty mortal sins than be a leper ; but a 
kingly saint may touch heights of piety which are un- 
attainable by himself. And, at the same time, he makes 
us feel that Louis is not the less a man because he is a 
saint. Certain human infirmities of temper are his ; yet 
his magnanimity, his sense of justice, his ardent devotion, 
his charity, his pure self-surrender are made so sensible 
to us as we read the record of Joinville that we are willing 
to subscribe to the sentence of Voltaire : " It is not given 
to man to carry virtue to a higher point." 

During the fourteenth century the higher spirit of 
feudalism declined ; the old faith and the old chivalry 
were suffering a decay ; the bourgeoisie grew in power 



FROISSART 53 

and sought for instruction ; it was an age of prose, in 
which learning was passing to the laity, or was adapted 
to their uses. Yet, while the inner life of chivalry failed 
day by day, and self-interest took the place of heroic 
self-surrender, the external pomp and decoration of the 
feudal world became more brilliant than ever. War was 
a trade practised from motives of vulgar cupidity; but it 
was adorned with splendour, and had a show of gallantry. 
The presenter in literature of this glittering spectacle is 
the historian Jean Froissart. Born in 1338, at Valen- 
ciennes, of bourgeois parents, Froissart, at the age of 
twenty-two, a disappointed lover, a tonsured clerk, and 
already a poet, journeyed to London, with his manu- 
script on the battle of Poitiers as an offering to his 
countrywoman, Queen Philippa of Hainault. For nearly 
five years he was the ditteuroi the Queen, a sharer in the 
life of the court, but attracted before all else to those 
" ancient knights and squires who had taken part in 
feats of arms, and could speak of them rightly." His 
patroness encouraged Froissart's historical inquiries. In 
the Chroniques of Jean le Bel, canon of Liege, he found 
material ready to his hand, and freely appropriated it in 
many of his most admirable pages ; but he also travelled 
much through England and Scotland, noting everything 
that impressed his imagination, and gathering with delight 
the testimony of those who had themselves been actors in 
the events of the past quarter of a century. He accom- 
panied the Black Prince to Aquitaine, and, later, the 
Duke of Clarence to Milan. The death of Queen Philippa, 
in 1369, was ruinous to his prospects. For a time he 
supported himself as a trader in his native place. Then 
other patrons, kinsfolk of the Queen, came to his aid. 
The first revised redaction of the first book of his 



54 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Chronicles was his chief occupation while cure of Les- 
tinnes ; it is a record of events from 1325 to the death 
of Edward III., and its brilliant narrative of events still 
recent or contemporary insured its popularity with aris- 
tocratic readers. Under the influence of Queen Philippa's 
brother-in-law, Robert of Namur, it is English in its 
sympathies and admirations. Unhappily Froissart was 
afterwards moved by his patron, Gui de Blois, to rehandle 
the book in the French interest ; and once again in his 
old age his work was recast with a view to effacing the 
large debt which he owed to his predecessor, Jean le Bel. 
The first redaction is, however, that which won and re- 
tained the general favour. If his patron induced Froissart 
to wrong his earlier work, he made amends, for it is to 
Gui de Blois that we owe the last three books of the 
history, which bring the tale of events down to the 
assassination of Richard II. Still the cure of Lestinnes 
and the canon of Chimai pursued his early method of 
travel — to the court of Gaston, Count of Foix, to Flanders, 
to England — ever eager in his interrogation of witnesses. 
It is believed that he lived to the close of 1404, but the 
date of his death is uncertain. 

Froissart as a poet wrote gracefully in the conventional 
modes of his time. His vast romance Meliador, to which 
Wenceslas, Duke of Brabant, contributed the lyric part 
— famous in its day, long lost and recently recovered — is 
a construction of external marvels and splendours which 
lacks the inner life of imaginative faith. But as a brilliant 
scene-painter Froissart the chronicler is unsurpassed. 
His chronology, even his topography, cannot be trusted 
as exact; he is credulous rather than critical; he does not 
always test or control the statements of his informants; 
he is misled by their prejudices and passions; he views 



FROISSART 5 5 

all things from the aristocratic standpoint; the life of the 
common people does not interest him; he has no sense 
of their wrongs, and little pity for their sufferings; he 
does not study the deeper causes of events; he is almost 
incapable of reflection; he has little historical sagacity; 
lie accepts appearances without caring to interpret their 
meanings. But what a vivid picture he presents of the 
external aspects of fourteenth-century life! What a joy 
he has in adventure ! What an eye for the picturesque ! 
What movement, what colour! What a dramatic — or 
should we say theatrical? — feeling for life and action! 
Much, indeed, of the vividness of Froissart's narrative 
may be due to the eye-witnesses from whom he had 
obtained information; but genius was needed to preserve 
— perhaps to enhance — the animation of their recitals. 
If he understood his own age imperfectly, he depicted 
its outward appearance with incomparable skill ; and 
though his moral sense was shallow, and his knowledge 
of character far from profound, he painted portraits 
which live in the imagination of his readers. 

The fifteenth century is rich in historical writings of 
every kind — compilations of general history, domestic 
chronicles, such as the Livre des Faits du bon Messire 
Jean le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, official chronicles both 
of the French and Burgundian parties, journals and 
memoirs. The Burgundian Enguerrand de Monstrelet 
was a lesser Froissart, faithful, laborious, a transcriber of 
documents, but without his predecessor's genius. On 
the French side the so - called Chronique Scandaleuse, 
by Jean de Roye, a Parisian of the time of Louis XI., 
to some extent redeems the mediocrity of the writers 
of his party. 

In Philippe de Commines we meet the last chronicler 



56 FRENCH LITERATURE 

of the Middle Ages, and the first of modern historians. 
Born about 1445, in Flanders, of the family of Van den 
Clyte, Commines, whose parents died early, received a 
scanty education ; but if he knew no Latin, his acquaint- 
ance with modern languages served him well. At first 
in the service of Charles the Bold, in 1472 he passed 
over to the cause of Louis XI. His treason to the Duke 
may be almost described as inevitable ; for Commines 
.could not attach himself to violence and folly, and was 
naturally drawn to the counsels of civil prudence. The 
bargain was as profitable to his new^ master as to the 
servant. On the King's death came a reverse of fortune 
for Commines : for eight months he was cramped in the 
iron cage ; during two years he remained a prisoner in 
the Conciergerie (1487-89), with enforced leisure to 
think of the preparation of his Mhnoires. 1 Again the 
sunshine of royal favour returned ; he followed Charles 
VIII. to Italy, and was engaged in diplomatic service at 
Venice. In 1511 he died. 

— ' The Memoires of Commines were composed as a body 
of material for a projected history of Louis XI. by Arch- 
bishop Angelo Cato ; the writer, apparently in all sin- 
cerity, hoped that his unlearned French might thus 
be translated into Latin, the language of scholars ; 
happily we possess the Memoirs as they left their 
author's mind. And, though Commines rather hides 
than thrusts to view his own personality, every page 
betrays the presence of a remarkable intellect. He was 
no artist either in imaginative design or literary execu- 
tion ; he was before all else a thinker, a student of poli- 
tical phenomena, a searcher after the causes of events, 
an analyst of motives, a psychologist of individual char- 
1 Books I.-VL, written 1488-94 ; Books VII., VIII., written 1494-95. 



COMMINES 57 

acter and of the temper of peoples, and, after a fashion, a 
moralist in his interpretation of history. He cared little, 
or not at all, for the coloured surface of life ; his chief 
concern is to seize the master motive by which men and 
events are ruled, to comprehend the secret springs of 
action. He is aristocratic in his politics, monarchical, 
an advocate for the centralisation of power ; but he would 
have the monarch enlightened, constitutional, and pacific. 
He values solid gains more than showy magnificence ; 
and knowing the use of astuteness, he knows also the 
importance of good faith. He has a sense of the balance 
of European power, and anticipates Montesquieu in his 
theory of the influence of climates on peoples. There is 
something of pity, something of irony, in the view which 
he takes of the joyless lot of the great ones of the earth. 
Having ascertained how few of the combinations of 
events can be controlled by the wisest calculation, he 
takes refuge in a faith in Providence ; he finds God 
necessary to explain this entangled world ; and yet his 
morality is in great part that which tries good and evil 
by the test of success. By the intensity of his thought 
Commines sometimes becomes striking in his expression; 
occasionally he rises to a grave eloquence ; occasionally 
his irony is touched by a bitter humour. But in general 
he writes with little sentiment and no sense of beauty, 
under the control of a dry and circumspect intelligence. 



CHAPTER IV 

LATEST MEDIAEVAL POETS— THE DRAMA 

I 

Latest Medieval Poets 

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries form a period of 
transition from the true Middle Ages to the Renaissance. 
The national epopee was dead ; the Arthurian tales were 
rehandled in prose ; under the influence of the Roman de 
la Rose, allegory was highly popular, and Jean de Meun 
had shown how it could be applied to the secularisation 
of learning ; the middle classes were seeking for instruc- 
tion. In lyric poetry the free creative spirit had declined, 
but the technique of verse was elaborated and reduced 
to rule ; ballade, chant royal, lai, virelai, rondeau were 
the established forms, and lyric verse was often used for 
matter of a didactic, moral, or satirical tendency. Even 
Ovid was tediously moralised (c. 1300) in some seventy 
thousand lines by Chretien Legouais. Literary societies 
or puys x were instituted, which maintained the rules of art, 
and awarded crowns to successful competitors in poetry; 
a formal ingenuity replaced lyrical inspiration ; poetry 
accepted proudly the name of " rhetoric." At the same 

1 Puy, mountain, eminence, signifying the elevated seat of the judges of the 
artistic competition. 



MACHAUT: DESCHAMPS 59 

time there is gain in one respect — the poets no longer 
conceal their own personality behind their work : they 
instruct, edify, moralise, express their real or simulated 
passions in their own persons ; if their art is mechanical, 
yet through it we make some acquaintance with the men 
and manners of the age. 

The chief exponent of the new art of poetry was 
Guillaume de Machaut. Born about 1300, he served 
as secretary to the King of Bohemia, who fell at Cr£cy. 
He enjoyed a tranquil old age in his province of Cham- 
pagne, cultivating verse and music with the applause of 
his contemporaries. The ingenuities of gallantry are 
deployed at length in his Jugement du Roi de Navarre ; 
he relates with dull prolixity the history of his patron, 
Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, in his Prise c? Alex- 
andre ; the Voir dit relates in varying verse and prose 
the course of his sexagenarian love for a maiden in 
her teens, Peronne d'Armentieres, who gratified her 
coquetry with an old poet's adoration, and then wedded 
his rival. 

In the forms of his verse Eustache Deschamps, also 
a native of Champagne (c. 1 345-1405), was a disciple 
of Machaut : if he was not a poet, he at least interests 
a reader by rhymed journals of his own life and the life 
of his time, written in the spirit of an honest bourgeois, 
whom disappointed personal hopes and public mis- 
fortune had early embittered. Eighty thousand lines, 
twelve hundred ballades, nearly two hundred rondeaux, 
a vast unfinished satire on woman, the Miroir de Mariage, 
fatigued even his own age, and the official court poet 
of France outlived his fame. He sings of love in the 
conventional modes ; his historical poems, celebrating 
events of the day, have interest by virtue of their matter ; 



60 FRENCH LITERATURE 

as a moralist in verse he deplores the corruption of 
high and low, the cupidity in Church and State, and, 
above all, applies his wit to expose the vices and infir- 
mities of women. The earliest Poetic in French — L'art 
de dictier et de fere chancons, balades, virelais, et rondeaidx 
(1392) — is the work of Eustache Deschamps, in which 
the poet, by no means himself a master of harmonies, 
insists on the prime importance of harmony in verse. 

The exhaustion of the mediaeval sources of inspiration 
is still more apparent in the fifteenth-century successors 
of Deschamps. But already something of the reviving 
influence of Italian culture makes itself felt. Christine 
DE PlSAN, Italian by her parentage and place of birth 
(e. 1363), was left a widow with three young children at 
the age of twenty-five. Her sorrow, uttered in verse, is 
a genuine lyric cry; but when in her poverty she prac- 
tised authorship as a trade, while she wins our respect 
as a mother, the poetess is too often at once facile and 
pedantic. Christine was zealous in maintaining the 
honour of her sex against the injuries of Jean de Meun ; 
in her prose Cite des Dames she celebrates the virtues 
and heroism of women, with examples from ancient and 
modern times; in the Livre des Trois Vertus she instructs 
women in their duties. When advanced in years, and 
sheltered in the cloister, she sang her swan -song in 
honour of Joan of Arc. Admirable in every relation of 
life, a patriot and a scholar, she only needed one thing 
— genius — to be a poet of distinction. 

A legend relates that the Dauphiness, Margaret of 
Scotland, kissed the lips of a sleeper who was the ugliest 
man in France, because from that " precious mouth " 
had issued so many "good words and virtuous sayings." 
The sleeper was Christine's poetical successor, Alain 



ALAIN CHARTIER 61 

Chartier. His fame was great, and as a writer of prose 
he must be remembered with honour, both for his patri- 
otic ardour, and for the harmonious eloquence (modelled 
on classical examples) in which that ardour found ex- 
pression. His first work, the Livre des Quatre Dames , 
is in verse : four ladies lament their husbands slain, 
captured, lost, or fugitive and dishonoured, at Agincourt. 
Many of his other poems were composed as a distraction 
from the public troubles of the time ; the title of one, 
widely celebrated in its own day, La Belle Dame sans 
Mercy, has obtained a new meaning of romance through 
its appropriation by Keats. In 1422 he wrote his prose 
Quadrilogne Invectif, in which suffering France implores 
the nobles, the clergy, the people to show some pity for 
her miserable state. If Froissart had not discerned the 
evils of the feudal system, they were patent to the eyes 
of Alain Chartier. His Livre de rEspe'rance, where the 
oratorical prose is interspersed with lyric verse, spares 
neither the clergy nor the frivolous and dissolute gentry, 
who forget their duty to their country in wanton self- 
indulgence ; yet his last word, written at the moment 
when Joan of Arc was leaving the pastures for battle, 
is one of hope. His Curial {The Courtier) is a satire on 
the vices of the court by one who had acquaintance with 
its corruption. The large, harmonious phrase of Alain 
Chartier was new to French prose, and is hardly heard 
again until the seventeenth century. 

The last grace and refinements of chivalric society 
blossom in the poetry of Charles d'Orl^ans, " la grace 
exquise des choses freles." He was born in 1391, son of 
Louis, Duke of Orleans, and an Italian mother, Valentine 
of Milan. Married at fifteen to the widow of Richard II. 
of England, he lost his father by assassination, his mother 



62 FRENCH LITERATURE 

by the stroke of grief, his wife in childbirth. From the 
battlefield of Agincourt he passed to England, where he 
remained a prisoner, closely guarded, for twenty-five 
years. It seems as if events should have made him a 
tragic poet ; but for Charles d'Orleans poetry was the 
brightness or the consolation of his exile. His elder 
years at the little court of Blois were a season of delicate 
gaiety, when he enjoyed the recreations of age, and 
smiled at the passions of youth. He died in 1465. 
Neither depth of reflection nor masculine power of 
feeling finds expression in his verse ; he does not con- 
tribute new ideas to poetry, nor invent new forms, but 
he rendered the old material and made the accepted 
moulds of verse charming by a gracious personality and 
an exquisite sense of art. Ballade, rondeau, chanson, 
each is manipulated with the skill of a goldsmith setting 
his gems. He sings of the beauty of woman, the lighter 
joys of love, the pleasure of springtide, the song of 
the birds, the gliding of a stream or a cloud ; or, as an 
elder man, he mocks with amiable irony the fatiguing 
ardours of young hearts. When St. Valentine's day 
comes round, his good physician " Nonchaloir " advises 
him to abstain from choosing a mistress, and recom- 
mends an easy pillow. The influence of Charles 
d'Orleans on French poetry was slight; it was not until 
1734 that his forgotten poems were brought to light. 

In the close of the mediaeval period, when old things 
were passing away and new things were as yet unborn, 
the minds of men inclined to fill the void with mockery 
and satire. Martin Lefranc (c. 1410-61) in his Champion 
des Dames — a poem of twenty-four thousand lines, in 
which there is much spirit and vigour of versification — 
balances one against another the censure and the praise 



VILLON 63 

of women. Coquillard, with his railleries assuming legal 
forms and phrases, laughs at love and lovers, or at the 
Droits Nouveaux of a happy time when licence had be- 
come the general law. Henri Baude, a realist in his 
keen observation, satirises with direct, incisive force, 
the manners and morals of his age. Martial d'Auvergne 
(c. 1433-1508), chronicling events in his Vigiles de Charles 
VII., a poem written according to the scheme of the 
liturgical Vigils, is eloquent in his expression of the 
wrongs of the poor, and in his condemnation of the 
abuses of power and station. If the Amant rendu Cor- 
delier be his, he too appears among those who jest at 
the follies and extravagance of love. His prose Arrets 
d Amour are discussions and decisions of the imaginary- 
court which determines questions of gallantry. 

Amid such mockery of life and love, the horror of death 
was ever present to the mind of a generation from which 
hope and faith seemed to fail ; it was the time of the 
Danse Macabre ; the skeleton became a grim humourist 
satirising human existence, and verses written for the 
dance of women were ascribed in the manuscript which 
preserves them to Martial d'Auvergne. 

Passion and the idea of death mingle with a power 
at once realistic and romantic in the poetry of Francois 
Villon. He was born in poverty, an obscure child of 
the capital, in 1430 or 143 1 ; he adopted the name of his 
early protector, Villon ; obtained as a poor scholar his 
bachelor's degree in 1449, and three years later became a 
maitre es arts ; but already he was a master of arts less 
creditable than those of the University. In 1455 Villon — 
or should we call him Monterbier, Montcorbier, Corbueil, 
Desloges, Mouton (aliases convenient for vagabondage) ? 
— quarrelled with a priest, and killed his adversary ; he 



64 FRENCH LITERATURE 

was condemned to death, and cheered his spirits with 
the piteous ballade for those about to swing to the kites 
and the crows ; but the capital punishment was com- 
muted to banishment. Next winter, stung by the infi- 
delity and insults of a woman to whom he had abandoned 
himself, he fled, perhaps to Angers, bidding his friends a 
jesting farewell in the bequests of his Petit Testament. 
Betrayed by one who claimed him as an associate in 
robbery, Villon is lost to view for three years ; and 
when we rediscover him in 1461, it is as a prisoner, 
whose six months' fare has been bread and water in 
his cell at Meun-sur-Loire. The entry of Louis XL, 
recently consecrated king, freed the unhappy captive. 
Before the year closed he had composed his capital 
work, the Grand Testament, and proved himself the 
most original poet of his century. And then Villon 
disappears ; whether he died soon after, whether he 
lived for half a score of years, we do not know. 

While he handles with masterly ease certain of the 
fifteenth-century forms of verse — in particular the bal- 
lade — Villon is a modern in his abandonment of the 
traditional machinery of the imagination, its conven- 
tion of allegories and abstractions, and those half-realised 
moralisings which were repeated from writer to writer ; 
he is modern in the intensity of a personal quality which 
is impressed upon his work, in the complexity of his 
feelings, passing from mirth to despair, from beauty 
to horror, from cynical grossness to gracious memories 
or aspirations ; he is modern in his passion for the real, 
and in those gleams of ideal light which are suddenly 
dashed across the vulgar surroundings of his sorry 
existence. While he flings out his scorn and indigna- 
tion against those whom he regarded as his ill-users, 



ANTOINE DE LA SALLE 65 

or cries against the injuries of fortune, or laments his 
miserable past, he yet is a passionate lover of life ; 
and shadowing beauty and youth and love and life, he 
is constantly aware of the imminent and inexorable 
tyranny of death. The ideas which he expresses are 
few and simple — ideas common to all men ; but they 
take a special colour from his own feelings and ex- 
periences, and he renders them with a poignancy which 
is his own, with a melancholy gaiety and a desperate 
imaginative sincerity. His figure is so interesting in 
itself — that of the enfant perdu of genius — and so typical 
of a class, that th.e temptation to create a Villon legend 
is great ; but to magnify his proportions to those of the 
highest poets is to do him wrong. His passionate inten- 
sity within a limited range is unsurpassed; but Villon 
wanted sanity, and he wanted breadth. 

In his direct inspiration from life, co-operating with 
an admirable skill and science in literary form, Villon 
stands alone. For others — Georges Chastelain, Meschinot, 
Molinet, Cretin — poetry was a cumbrous form of rhetoric, 
regulated by the rules of those arts of poetry which 
during the fifteenth century appeared at not infrequent 
intervals. The grands rhetoriqueurs with their compli- 
cated measures, their pedantic diction, their effete alle- 
gory, their points and puerilities, testify to the exhaustion 
of the Middle Ages, and to the need of new creative 
forces for the birth of a living literature. 

There is life, however, in the work of one remarkable 
prose-writer of the time — Antoine de la Salle. His 
residence in Rome (1422) had made him acquainted 
with the tales of the Italian novellieri ; he was a friend 
of the learned and witty Poggio ; Rene of Anjou en- 
trusted to him the education of his son ; when advanced 



66 FRENCH LITERATURE 

in years he became the author certainly of one master- 
piece, probably of three. If he was the writer of the 
Quinze Joies de Mariage, he knew how to mask a rare 
power of cynical observation under a smiling face : the 
Church had celebrated the fifteen joys of the Blessed 
Virgin ; he would ironically depict the fifteen afflictions 
of wedded life, in scenes finely studied from the domestic 
interior. How far the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles are to be 
ascribed to him is doubtful; it is certain that these licen- 
tious tales reproduce, with a new skill in narrative prose, 
the spirit of indecorous mirth in their Italian models. 
The Petit JeJian de Saintre is certainly the work of 
Antoine de la Salle ; the irony of a realist, endowed with 
subtlety and grace, conducts the reader through chivalric 
exaltations to vulgar disillusion. The writer was not 
insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past, but 
he presents them only in the end to cover them with 
disgrace. The anonymous farce of Pathelin, and the 
Chronique de petit Jehan de Saintre', are perhaps the most 
instructive documents which we possess with respect to 
the moral temper of the close of the Middle Ages ; and 
there have been critics who have ventured to ascribe 
both works to the same hand. 



II 

The Drama 

The mediaeval drama in France, though of early origin, 
attained its full development only when the Middle 
Ages were approaching their term ; its popularity con- 
tinued during the first half of the sixteenth century. It 
waited for a public ; with the growth of industry, the 



EARLY DRAMA 67 

uprising of the middle classes, it secured its audience, 
and in some measure filled the blank created by the 
disappearance of the chansons de geste. The survivals of 
the drama of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are 
few; the stream, as we know, was flowing, but it ran 
underground. 

The religious drama had its origin in the liturgical 
offices of the Church. At Christmas and at Easter the 
T5irth and resurrection of the Saviour were dramatically 
recited to the people by the clergy, within the conse- 
crated building, in Latin paraphrases of the sacred text ; 
but, as yet, neither Jesus nor His mother appeared as 
actors in the drama. By degrees the vernacular en- 
croached upon the Latin and displaced it ; the scene 
passed from the church to the public place or street ; 
the action developed ; and the actors were priests sup- 
ported by lay-folk, or were lay-folk alone. 

The oldest surviving drama written in French (but 
with interspersed liturgical sentences of Latin) is of the 
twelfth century — the Representation d'Adam: the fall of 
man, and the first great crime which followed — the death 
of Abel — are succeeded by the procession of Messianic 
prophets. It was enacted outside the church, and the 
spectators were alarmed or diverted by demons who 
darted to and fro amidst the crowd. Of the thirteenth 
century, only two religious pieces remain. Jean Bodel, 
of Arras, was the author of Saint Nicholas. The poet, 
himself about to assume the cross, exhibits a handful of 
Crusaders in combat with the Mussulmans ; all but one, 
a supplicant of the saint, die gloriously, with angelic 
applause and pity ; whereupon the feelings of the 
audience are relieved by the mirth and quarrels of 
drinkers in a tavern, who would rob St. Nicholas of the 



68 FRENCH LITERATURE 

treasure entrusted to his safeguard; miracles, and general 
conversion of the infidels, conclude the drama. The 
miracle of Tke'opkile, the ambitious priest who pawned 
his soul to Satan, and through our Lady's intercession 
recovered his written compact, is by the trouvere Rute- 
beuf. These are scanty relics of a hundred years ; yet 
their literary value outweighs that of the forty -two 
Miracles de Notre Dame of the century which followed 
■ — rude pieces, often trivial, often absurd in their inci- 
dents, with mystic extravagance sanctifying their vulgar 
realism. They formed, with two exceptions, the dramatic 
repertory of some mediaeval "picy, an association half- 
literary, half-religious, devoted to the Virgin's honour ; 
their rhymed octosyllabic verse — the special dramatic 
form — at times borders upon prose. One drama, and 
only one, of the fourteenth century, chooses another 
heroine than our Lady — the Histoire de Griselidis, which 
presents, with pathos and intermingling mirth, those 
marvels of wifely patience celebrated for other lands by 
Boccaccio, by Petrarch, and by Chaucer. 

The fifteenth-century Mystery exhibits the culmination 
of the mediaeval sacred drama. The word mystere>- first 
appropriated to tableaux vivants, is applied to dramatic 
performances in the royal privilege which in 1402 
conferred upon the association known as the Confrerie 
de la Passion the right of performing the plays of our 
Redemption. Before this date the Blessed Virgin and 
the infant Jesus had appeared upon the scene. The 
Mystery presents the course of sacred story, derived 
from the Old and the New Testaments, together with 
the lives of the saints from apostolic times to the days 

1 Derived from ministerium {metier), but doubtless often drawing to itself a 
sense suggested by the mysteries of religion. 



ARNOUL GREBAN 69 

of St. Dominic and St. Louis ; it even includes, in an 
extended sense, subjects from profane history — the siege 
of Orleans, the destruction of Troy — but such subjects 
are of rare occurrence during the fifteenth century. 

For a hundred years, from 1450 onwards, an unbounded 
enthusiasm for the stage possessed the people, not of 
Paris merely, but of all France. The Confreres de la 
Passion, needing a larger repertoire, found in young 
Arxoul Greban, bachelor in theology, an author whose 
vein was copious. His Passion, written about the middle 
of the fifteenth century, embraces the entire earthly 
life of Christ in its thirty-four thousand verses, which 
required one hundred and fifty performers and four 
crowded days for the delivery. Its presentation was an 
unprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The 
work of Greban was rehandled and enlarged by Jean 
Michel, and great was the triumph when it was given 
at Angers in i486. Greban was not to be outdone 
either by his former self or by another dramatist ; in 
collaboration with his brother Simon, he composed 
the yet more enormous Actes des Apotres, in sixty-two . 
thousand lines, demanding the services of five hundred 
performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536, 
the happiness of the spectators was extended over no 
fewer than forty days. The Mystery of the Old Testa- 
ment, selecting whatever was supposed to typify or 
foreshadow the coming of the Messiah, is only less 
vast, and is not less incoherent. Taken together, the 
Mysteries comprise over a million verses, and what 
remains is but a portion of what was written. 

Though the literary value of the Mysteries is slight, 
except in occasional passages of natural feeling or just 
characterisation, their historical importance was great; 



70 FRENCH LITERATURE 

they met a national demand — they constituted an ani- 
mated and moving spectacle of universal interest. A 
certain unity they possessed in the fact that everything 
revolved around the central figure of Christ and the 
central theme of man's salvation ; but such unity is only 
to be discovered in a broad and distant view. Near at 
hand the confusion seems great. Their loose construction 
and unwieldy length necessarily endangered their exist- 
ence when a truer feeling for literary art was developed. 
The solemnity of their matter gave rise to a further 
danger ; it demanded some relief, and that relief was 
secured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside 
scenes of gravest import. Such comedy was occasion- 
ally not without grace — a passage of pastoral, a song, a 
nai've piece of gaiety ; but buffoonery or vulgar riot was 
more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to the 
furthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris 
thought fit to interdict the performance of sacred 
dramas which had lost the sense of reverence and 
even of common propriety. They had scandalised 
serious Protestants ; the Catholics declined to defend 
what was indefensible ; the humanists and lovers of 
classical art in Renaissance days thought scorn of the 
rude mediaeval drama. Though it died by violence, its 
existence could hardly have been prolonged for many 
years. But in the days of its popularity the performance 
of a mystery set a whole city in motion ; carpenters, 
painters, costumiers, machinists were busy in prepara- 
tion ; priests, scholars, citizens rehearsed their parts ; 
country folk crowded to every hostelry and place of 
lodging. On the day preceding the first morning of 
performance the personages, duly attired — Christians, 
Jews, Saracens, kings, knights, apostles, priests — defiled 



THE STAGE: ACTORS yi 

-through the streets on their way to the cathedral to 
mass. The vast stage hard by the church presented, 
with primitive properties, from right to left, the suc- 
cession of places — lake, mountain, manger, prison, 
banquet - chamber — in which the action should be 
imagined; and from one station to another the actors 
passed as the play proceeded. At one end of the stage 
rose heaven, where God sat throned ; at the other, 
hell-mouth gaped, and the demons entered or emerged. 
Musjc aided the action ; the drama was tragedy, 
comedy, opera, pantomime in one. The actors were 
amateurs from every class of society — clergy, scholars, 
tradesmen, mechanics, occasionally members of the 
noblesse. In Paris the Confraternity of the Passion had 
almost an exclusive right to present these sacred plays ; 
in the provinces associations were formed to carry out 
the costly and elaborate performance. To the Confreres 
de la Passion — bourgeois folk and artisans — belonged 
the first theatre, and it was they who first presented 
plays at regular intervals. From the Hospital of the 
Trinity, originally a shelter for pilgrims, they migrated 
in 1539 to the Hotel de Flandres, and thence in 1548 to 
the Hotel de Bourgogne. Their famous place of per- 
formance passed in time into the hands of professional 
actors; but it was not until 1676 that the Confrerie ceased 
to exist. 

Comedy, unlike the serious drama, suffered no breach 
of continuity during its long history. The jongleurs 
of the Middle Ages were the immediate descendants of 
the Roman mimes and histrions ; their declamations, 
accompanied by gestures, at least tended towards the 
dramatic form. Classical comedy was never wholly 
forgotten in the schools ; the liturgical drama and the 



72 FRENCH LITERATURE 

sacred pieces developed from it had an indirect influence 
as encouraging dramatic feeling, and providing models 
which could be applied to other uses. The earliest 
surviving jenx are of Arras, the work of Adam de la 
Halle. In the Jen d'Adam or de la Feuillee {c. 1262) 
satirical studies of real life mingle strangely with fairy 
fantasy ; the poet himself, lamenting his griefs of wed- 
lock, his father, his friends are humorously introduced ; 
the fool and the physician play their laughable parts ; 
and the three fay ladies, for whom the citizens hava pre- 
pared a banquet under la feuillee, grant or refuse the 
wishes of the mortal folk in the traditional manner of 
enchantresses amiable or perverse. The Jeu de Robin et 
Marion — first performed at Naples in 1283 — is a pastoral 
comic opera, with music, song, and dance ; the good 
Marion is loyal to her rustic lover, and puts his rival, 
her cavalier admirer, to shame. These were happy 
inventions happily executed ; but they stand alone. It 
is not until we reach the fifteenth century that mediaeval 
comedy, in various forms, attained its true evolution. 

The Moralities, of which sixty -five survive, dating, 
almost all, from 1450 to 1550, differed from the Myste- 
ries in the fact that their purpose was rather didactic 
than religious ; as a rule they handled neither historical 
nor legendary matter; they freely employed allegorical 
personification after the fashion of the Roman de la 
Rose. The general type is well exemplified in Bien- 
Avise, Mal-Avise, a kind of dramatic Pilgrim's Pro- 
gress, with two pilgrims — one who is instructed in 
the better way by all the personified powers which 
make for righteousness ; the other finding his com- 
panions on the primrose path, and arriving at the 
everlasting bonfire. Certain Moralities attack a par- 



MORALITIES 73 

ticular vice — gluttony or blasphemy, or the dishonouring 
of parents. From satirising the social vices of the time, 
the transition was easy to political satire or invective. 
In the sixteenth century both the partisans of the Re- 
formation and the adherents to the traditional creed 
employed the Morality as a medium for ecclesiastical 
polemics. Sometimes treating of domestic manners and 
morals, it became a kind of bourgeois drama, presenting 
the conditions under which character is formed. Some- 
times again it approached the farce : two lazy mendicants, 
one blind, the other lame, fear that they may suffer a cure 
and lose their trade through the efficacy of the relics 
of St. Martin ; the halt, mounted on the other's back, 
directs his fellow in their flight ; by ill luck they encoun- 
ter the relic-bearers, and are restored in eye and limb ; 
the recovered cripple swears and rages ; but the man 
born blind, ravished by the wonders of the world, breaks 
forth in praise to God. The higher Morality naturally 
selected types of character for satire or commendation. 
It is easy to perceive how such a comic art as that of 
Moliere lay in germ in this species of the mediaeval 
drama. At a late period examples are found of the his- 
torical Morality. The pathetic I' Empereur qui tua son 
Neveu exhibits in its action and its stormy emotion 
something of tragic power. The advent of the pseudo- 
classical tragedy of the Pleiade checked the development 
of this species. The very name " Morality " disappears 
from the theatre after 1550. 

The sottie, like the Morality, was a creation of the 
fifteenth century. Whether it had its origin in a laicis- 
ing of the irreverent celebration of the Feast of Fools, 
or in that parade of fools which sometimes preceded a 
Mystery, it was essentially a farce, but a farce in which 



74 FRENCH LITERATURE 

the performers, arrayed in motley, and wearing the long- 
eared cap, distributed between them the several rdles of 
human folly. Associations of sots, known in Paris as 
Enfants sans Sonci, known in other cities by other names, 
presented the unwisdom or madness of the world in 
parody. The sottie at times rose from a mere diversion 
to satire ; like the Morality, it could readily adapt itself 
to political criticism. The Gens Notiveaux, belonging 
perhaps to the reign of Louis XL, mocks the hypocrisy 
of those sanguine reformers who promise to create the 
world anew on a better model, and yet, after all, have 
no higher inspiration than that old greed for gold and 
power and pleasure which possessed their predecessors. 
Louis XII., who permitted free comment on public affairs 
from actors on the stage, himself employed the poet 
Pierre Gringoire to satirise his adversary the Pope. In 
1512 the Jen du Prince des Sots was given in Paris ; Grin- 
goire, the Mere-Sotte, but wearing the Papal robes to 
conceal for a time the garb of folly, discharged a prin- 
cipal part. Such dangerous pleasantries as this were 
vigorously restrained by Frangois I. 

A dramatic monologue or a sermon joyeux was com- 
monly interposed between the sottie and the Morality or 
miracle which followed. The sermon parodied in verse 
the pulpit discourses of the time, with text duly an- 
nounced, the customary scholastic divisions, and an 
incredible licence in matter and in phrase. Among the 
dramatic monologues of the fifteenth century is found 
at least one little masterpiece, which has been ascribed 
on insufficient grounds to Villon, and which would do 
no discredit to that poet's genius — the Franc- Archer de 
Bagnolet. The francs-archers of Charles VII. — a rural 
militia — were not beloved of the people; the mi.es 



FARCES 



75 



gloriosus of Bagnolet village, boasting largely of his 
valour, encounters a stuffed scarecrow, twisting to the 
wind ; his alarms, humiliations, and final triumph are 
rendered in a monologue which expounds the action 
of the piece with admirable spirit. 

If the Mystery served to fill the void left by the national 
epopee, the farce may be regarded as to some extent the 
dramatic inheritor of the spirit of the fabliau. It aims 
at mirth and laughter for their own sakes, without any 
purpose of edification ; it had, like the fabliau, the merit 
of brevity, and not infrequently the fault of unabashed 
grossness. But the very fact that it was a thing of little 
consequence allowed the farce to exhibit at times an 
audacity of political or ecclesiastical criticism which 
transformed it into a dramatised pamphlet. In general 
it chose its matter from the ludicrous misadventures of 
private life : the priest, the monk, the husband, the 
mother-in-law, the wife, the lover, the roguish servant 
are the agents in broadly ludicrous intrigues ; the 
young wife lords it over her dotard husband, and makes 
mockery of his presumptive heirs, in La Cornette of Jean 
d'Abondance ; in Le Cuvier, the husband, whose many 
household duties have been scheduled, has his revenge 
— the list, which he deliberately recites while his wife 
flounders helpless in the great washing-tub, does not 
include the task of effecting her deliverance. 

Amid much that is trivial and much that is indecent, 
one farce stands out pre-eminent, and may indeed be 
called a comedy of manners and of character — the 
merry misfortunes of that learned advocate, Maitre 
Pierre Pathelin. The date is doubtless about 1470 ; 
the author, probably a Parisian and a member of the 
Basoche, is unknown. With all his toiling and cheat- 



76 FRENCH LITERATURE 

ing ; Pathelin is poor ; with infinite art and spirit he 
beguiles the draper of the cloth which will make 
himself a coat and his faithful Guillemette a gown ; 
when the draper, losing no time, comes for his 
money and an added dinner of roast goose, behold 
Maitre Pathelin is in a raging fever, raving in every 
dialect. Was the purchase of his cloth a dream, or 
work of the devil ? To add to the worthy trades- 
man's ill-luck, his shepherd has stolen his wool and 
eaten his sheep. The dying Pathelin unexpectedly 
appears in court to defend the accused, and having 
previously advised his client to affect idiocy and reply 
to all questions with the senseless utterance bee, he 
triumphantly wins the case ; but the tables are turned 
when Master Pathelin demands his fee, and can obtain 
no other response than bee from the instructed shepherd. 
The triumph of rogue over rogue is the only moral of 
the piece ; it is a satire on fair dealing and justice, and, 
though the morals of a farce are not to be gravely in- 
sisted on, such morals as Maitre Pathelin presents agree 
well with the spirit of the age which first enjoyed this 
masterpiece of caricature. 

The actors in mediagval comedy, as in the serious 
drama, were amateurs. The members of the academic 
puys were succeeded by the members of guilds, or con- 
freries, or societes joyeuses. Of these societies the most 
celebrated was that of the Parisian Enfants sans Souci. 
With this were closely associated the Basochiens, the cor- 
poration of clerks to the procureurs of the Parlement of 
Paris. 1 It may be that the sots of the capital were only 
members of the basoche, assuming for the occasion the 

1 This corporation, known as the Royaume de la Basoche {basilica), was 
probably as old as the fourteenth century. 



ACTORS OF COMEDY 



77 



motley garb. In colleges, scholars performed at first in 
Latin plays, but from the fifteenth century in French. At 
the same time, troupes of performers occasionally moved 
from city to city, exhibiting a Mystery, but they did not 
hold together when the occasion had passed. Profes- 
sional comedians were brought from Italy to Lyons in 
1548, for the entertainment of Henri II. and Catherine 
de Medicis. From that date companies of French actors 
appear to become numerous. New species of the drama 
■ — tragedy, comedy, pastoral — replace the mediaeval 
forms ; but much of the genius of French classical 
comedy is a development from the Morality, the sottie, 
and the farce. To present these newer forms the service 
of trained actors was required. During the last quarter 
of the sixteenth century the amateur performers of the 
ancient drama finally disappear. 



BOOK THE- SECOND 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 



BOOK THE SECOND 

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 

CHAPTER I 

RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 

The literature of the sixteenth century is dominated by 
two chief influences — that of the Renaissance and that of 
the Reformation. When French armies under Charles 
VIII. and Louis XII. made a descent on Italy, they found 
everywhere a recognition of the importance of art, an 
enthusiasm for beauty, a feeling for the aesthetic as 
well as the scholarly aspects of antiquity, a new joy in 
life, an universal curiosity, a new confidence in human 
reason. To Latin culture a Greek culture had been 
added ; and side by side with the mediaeval master of 
the understanding, Aristotle, the master of the imagina- 
tive reason, Plato, was held in honour. Before the 
first quarter of the sixteenth century closed, France 
had received a great gift from Italy, which profoundly 
modified, but by no means effaced, the characteristics of 
her national genius. The Reformation was a recovery 
of Christian antiquity and of Hebraism, and for a time 
the religious movement made common cause with the 



82 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Renaissance ; but the grave morals, the opposition of 
grace to nature, and the dogmatic spirit of theology 
after a time alienated the Reforming party from the 
mere humanism of literature and art. An interest in 
general ideas and a capacity for dealing with them were 
fostered by the study of antiquity both classical and 
Christian, by the meeting of various tendencies, and by 
the conflict of rival creeds. To embody general ideas 
in art under a presiding feeling for beauty, to harmonise 
thought and form, was the great work of the seventeenth 
century ; but before this could be effected it was neces- 
sary that France should enjoy tranquillity after the strife 
of the civil wars. 

Learning had received the distinction of court patron- 
age when Louis XII. appointed the great scholar Bude 
his secretary. Around Francis I., although he was him- 
self rather a lover of the splendour and ornament of 
the Renaissance than of its finer spirit, men of learning 
and poets gathered. On the suggestion of Guillaume 
Bude he endowed professorships of Hebrew, Greek, 
and Latin, to which were added those of medicine, 
mathematics, and philosophy (1530-40), and in this 
projected foundation of the College de France an im- 
portant step was made towards the secularisation of 
learned studies. The King's sister, Marguerite of 
Navarre (1492-1549), perhaps the most accomplished 
woman of her time, represents more admirably than 
Francis the genius of the age. She studied Latin, 
Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and, when forty, 
occupied herself with Greek. Her heart was ardent 
as well as her intellect ; she was gay and mundane, 
and at the same time she was serious (with even a 
strain of mystical emotion) in her concern for religion. 



MARGUERITE OKNAVARRE S3 

Although not in communion with the Reformers, she 
sympathised with them, and extended a generous pro- 
tection to those who incurred danger through their liberal 
opinions. Her poems, Marguerites de la Marguerite des 
Princesses (1547), show the mediaeval influences forming 
a junction with those of the Renaissance. Some are 
religious, but side by side with her four dramatic Mys- 
teries and her eloquent Triomphe de I'Agneau appears 
the Histoire des Satyres et Nymphes de Diane, imitated 
from the Italian of Sannazaro. Among her latest 
poems, which remained in manuscript until 1896, are 
a pastoral dramatic piece expressing her grief for the 
death of her brother Francis I. ; a second dramatic 
poem, Come'die jouee au Mont de Marsan, in which love 
(human or divine) triumphs over the spirit of the world, 
over superstitious asceticism, and over the wiser temper 
of religious moderation. Les Prisons tells in allegory of 
her servitude to passion, to worldly ambition, and to the 
desire for human knowledge, until at last the divine 
love brought her deliverance. The union of the mun- 
dane and the moral spirit is singularly shown in Mar- 
guerite's collection of prose tales, written in imitation of 
Boccaccio, the Heptameron des Nouvelles (1558). 

These tales were not an indiscretion of youth ; pro- 
bably Marguerite composed them a few years before her 
death ; perhaps their licence and wanton mirth were 
meant to enliven the melancholy hours of her beloved 
brother ; certainly the writer is ingenious in extracting 
edifying lessons from narratives which do not promise 
edification. They are not so gross as other writings of 
the time, and this is Marguerite's true defence ; to laugh 
at the immoralities of monks and priests was a tradition 
in literature which neither the spirit of the Renaissance 



84 FRENCH LITERATURE 

nor that of the Reformation condemned. A company 
of ladies and gentlemen, detained by floods on their 
return from the Pyrenean baths, beguile the time by 
telling these tales, and the pious widow Dame Oisille 
gives excellent assistance in showing how they tend to 
a moral purpose. The series, designed to equal in 
number the tales of the Decameron, is incomplete. 
Possibly Marguerite was aided by some one or more 
of the authors of whom she was the patroness and pro- 
tector; but no sufficient evidence exists for the ascription 
of the Heptameron to Bonaventure des Periers. 

Among the poets whom Marguerite received with 
favour at her court was Clement Marot, the versifier, 
as characterised by Boileau, of "elegant badinage." 
His predecessors and early contemporaries in the open- 
ing years of the sixteenth century continued the manner 
of the so-called rketoriqueurs, who endeavoured to main- 
tain allegory, now decrepit or effete, with the aid of 
ingenuities of versification and pedantry of diction ; or 
else they carried on something of the more living tradi- 
tion of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, 
Jean le Maire de Beiges deserves to be remembered 
less for his verse than for his prose work, Illustrations 
de Gaule et Singularitez de Troie, in which the Trojan 
origin of the French people is set forth with some 
feeling for beauty and a mass of crude erudition. 
Clement Marot, born at Cahors in 1495 or 1496, a 
poet's son, was for a time in the service of Francis I. 
as valet de chambre, and accompanied his master to 
the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and made 
prisoner. Pursued by the Catholics as a heretic, and 
afterwards by the Genevan Calvinists as a libertine, 
he was protected as long as was possible by the King 



CLEMENT MAROT 85 

and bv his sister. He died at Turin, a refugee to 
Italy, in 1544. 

In his literary origins Marot belongs to the Middle 
Ages ; he edited the Roman de la Rose and the works 
of Villon ; his immediate masters were the grands rhe'to- 
riqueurs ; but the spirit of the Renaissance and his 
own genius delivered him from the oppression of their 
authority, and his intellect was attracted by the revolt 
and the promise of freedom found in the Reforming 
party. A light and pleasure-loving nature, a temper 
which made the prudent conduct of life impossible, 
exposed him to risks, over which, aided by protectors 
whom he knew how to flatter with a delicate grace, 
he glided without fatal mishap. He did not bring 
to poetry depth of passion or solidity of thought ; 
he brought what was needed — a bright intelligence, a 
sense of measure and proportion, grace, gaiety, esprit. 
Escaping, after his early Temple de Cupido, from the 
allegorising style, he learned to express his personal 
sentiments, and something of the gay, bourgeois spirit 
of France, with aristocratic distinction. His poetry of 
the court and of occasion has lost its savour ; but when 
he writes familiarly (as in the Jipitre an Roi pour avoir 
ete derobe), or tells a short tale (like the fable of the rat 
and the lion), he is charmingly bright and natural. None 
of his poems — elegies, epistles, satires, songs, epigrams, 
rondeaux, pastorals, ballades — overwhelm us by their 
length ; he was not a writer of vast imaginative ambi- 
tions. His best epigrams are masterpieces in their kind, 
with happy turns of thought and expression in which 
art seems to have the ease of nature. The satirical 
epistle supposed to be sent, not by Marot, but by his 
valet, to Marot's adversary, Sagon, is spirited in its 



86 FRENCH LITERATURE 

insolence. L'Enfer is a satiric outbreak of indignation 
suggested by his imprisonment in the Chatelet on the 
charge of heresy. His versified translation of forty-nine 
Psalms added to his glory, and brought him the honour 
of personal danger from the hostility of the Sorbonne ; 
but to attempt such a translation is to aim at what is 
impossible. His gift to French poetry is especially a 
gift of finer art — firm and delicate expression, felicity in 
rendering a thought or a feeling, certainty and grace 
in poetic evolution, skill in handling the decasyllabic 
line. A great poet Marot was not, and could not be ; 
but, coming at a fortunate moment, his work served 
literature in important ways ; it was a return from 
laboured rhetoric to nature. In the classical age his 
merit was recognised by La Bruyere, and the author 
of the Fables and the Contes — in some respects a kindred 
spirit — acknowledged a debt to Marot. 

From Marot as a poet much was learned by Marguerite 
of Navarre. Of his contemporaries, who were also dis- 
ciples, the most distinguished was Melin de Saint- 
Gelais, and on the master's death Melin passed for 
an eminent poet. We can regard him now more justly, 
as one who in slender work sought for elegance, and fell 
into a mannered prettiness. While preserving something 
of the French spirit, he suffered from the frigid ingenui- 
ties which an imitation of Italian models suggested to 
him ; but it cannot be forgotten that Saint-Gelais brought 
the sonnet from Italy into French poetry. The school 
of Marot, ambitious in little things, affected much the 
blason, which celebrates an eyebrow, a lip, a bosom, 
a jewel, a flower, a precious stone ; lyrical inspiration 
was slender, but clearness and grace were worth at- 
taining, and the conception of poetry as a fine art 



RABELAIS 87 

served to lead the way towards Ronsard and the 
Pleiade. 

The most powerful personality in literature of the 
first half of the sixteenth century was not a poet, though 
he wrote verses, but a great creator in imaginative prose, 
great partly by virtue of his native genius, partly because 
the sap of the new age of enthusiasm for science and 
learning was thronging in his veins — Francois Rabelais. 
Born about 1490 or 1495, at Chinon, in Touraine, of 
parents in a modest station, he received his education 
in the village of Seuille and at the convent of La Bau- 
mette. He revolted against the routine of the schools, and 
longed for some nutriment more succulent and savoury. 
For fifteen years he lived as a Franciscan monk in the 
cell and cloisters of the monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte. 
In books, but not those of a monastic library, he found 
salvation ; mathematics, astronomy, law, Latin, Greek 
consoled him during his period of uncongenial seclu- 
sion. His criminal companions — books which might be 
suspected of heresy — were sequestrated. The young 
Bishop of Maillezais — his friend Geoffroy d'Estissac, 
who had aided his studies — and the great scholar Bude 
came to his rescue, and passing first, by favour of the 
Pope, to the Benedictine abbey of Maillezais, before 
long he quitted the cloister, and, as a secular priest, 
began his wanderings of a scholar in search of universal 
knowledge. In 1530-31 he was at Montpellier, study- 
ing medicine and lecturing on medical works of Hippo- 
crates and Galen ; next year, at Lyons, one of the learned 
group gathered around the great printers of that city, 
he practised his art of physic in the public hospital, and 
was known as a scientific author. Towards the close of 
1532 he re-edited the popular romance Chroniques Gar- 



88 FRENCH LITERATURE 

gantuines, which tells the adventures of the "enormous 
giant Gargantua." It was eagerly read, and brought 
laughter to the lips of Master Rabelais' patients. Learn- 
ing, he held, was good, but few things in this world are 
wholesomer than laughter. The success of the Chro- 
niques seems to have moved him to write a continuation, 
and in 1533 appeared Pantagruel, the story of the deeds 
and prowess of Gargantua's giant son, newly composed 
by Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram which concealed the 
name of Francois Rabelais. It forms the second of the 
five books which make up its author's famous work. A 
recast or rather a new creation of the Chronicles of 
Gargantua, replacing the original Chroniques, followed 
in 1535. It was not until 1546 and 1552 that the second 
and — in its complete form — the third books of Pantagruel 
appeared, and the authorship was acknowledged. The 
last book was posthumous (1562 in part, 1564 in full), 
and the inferiority of style, together with the more bitter 
spirit of its satire, have led many critics to the opinion 
that it is only in part from the hand of the great and wise 
humourist. 

Rabelais was in Rome in 1534, and again in 1535, as 
physician to the French ambassador, Jean du Bellay, 
Bishop of Paris. He pursued his scientific studies in 
medicine and botany, took lessons in Arabic, and had 
all a savant's intelligent curiosity for the remains of 
antiquity. Some years of his life were passed in wan- 
dering from one French university to another. Fearing 
the hostility of the Sorbonne, during the last illness of 
his protector Francis I., he fled to the imperial city of 
Metz. He was once again in Rome with Cardinal du 
Bellay, in 1549. Next year the author of Pantagruel 
was appointed cure of Meudon, near Paris, but, perhaps 



RABELAIS 89 

as a concession to public opinion, he resigned his clerical 
charges on the eve of the publication of his fourth book. 
Rabelais died probably in 1552 or 1553, aged about sixty 
years. 

On his death it might well have been said that the 
gaiety of nations was eclipsed ; but to his contemporaries 
Rabelais appeared less as the enormous humourist, the 
buffoon Homer, than as a great scholar and man of 
science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversation 
were in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound 
judgment, and even a habit of moderation. It is thus 
that he should still be regarded. Below his laughter lay 
wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay a noble ideality; 
below the extravagances of his imagination lay the equi- 
librium of a spirit sane and strong. The life that was 
in him was so abounding and exultant that it broke all 
dikes and dams ; and laughter for him needed no justifi- 
cation, it was a part of this abounding life. After the 
mediaeval asceticism and the intellectual bondage of 
scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast outbreak and 
explosion ; he would be no fragment of humanity, but 
a complete man. He would enjoy the world to the full, 
and yet at the same time there is something of stoicism 
in his philosophy of life ; while gaily accepting the good 
things of the earth, he would hold himself detached from 
the gifts of fortune, and possess his soul in a strenuous 
sanity. Let us return — such is his teaching — to nature, 
honouring the body, but giving higher honour to the 
intellect and to the moral feeling ; let us take life seri- 
ously, and therefore gaily ; let us face death cheerfully, 
knowing that we do not wholly die ; with light in the 
understanding and love in the heart, we can confront all 
dangers and defy all doubts. 



go FRENCH LITERATURE 

He is the creator of characters which are types. His 
giants — Grandgousier, Gargantua, Pantagruel — are giants 
of good sense and large benevolence. The education of 
Pantagruel presents the ideal pedagogy of the Renais- 
sance, an education of the whole man — mind and body 
— in contrast with the dwarfing subtleties and word- 
spinning of the effete mediaeval schools. Friar John is 
the monk whose passion for a life of activity cannot be 
restrained ; his violence is the overflow of wholesome 
energy. It is to his care that the Abbey of Thelema is 
confided, where young men and maidens are to be occu- 
pied with every noble toil and every high delight, an 
abbey whose rule has but a single clause (since goodness 
has no rule save freedom), " Do what you will." Of such 
a fraternity, love and marriage are the happiest out- 
come. Panurge, for whom the suggestion was derived 
from the macaronic poet Folengo, is the fellow of Shake- 
speare's Falstaff, in his lack of morals, his egoism, his 
inexhaustible wit ; he is the worst and best of company. 
We would dispense with such a disreputable associate 
if we could, but save that he is a "very wicked lewd 
rogue," he is "the most virtuous man in the world," 
and we cannot part with him. Panurge would marry, 
but fears lest he may be the victim of a faithless wife ; 
every mode of divination, every source of prediction 
except one is resorted to, and still his fate hangs 
threatening ; it only remains to consult the oracle of 
La Dive Bouteille. The voyaging quest is long and 
perilous ; in each island at which the adventurers 
touch, some social or ecclesiastical abuse is exhibited 
for ridicule ; the word of the oracle is in the end 
the mysterious " Drink " — drink, that is, if one may 
venture to interpret an oracle, of the pure water 



BONAVENTURE DES PERIERS 



91 



of wisdom and knowledge, and let the unknown 
future rest. 

The obscenity and ordure of Rabelais were to the taste 
of his time ; his severer censures of Church and State 
were disguised by his buffoonery ; flinging out his good 
sense and wise counsels with a liberal hand, he also 
wields vigorously the dunghill pitchfork. If he is gross 
beyond what can be described, he is not, apart from the 
evil of such grossness, a corrupter of morals, unless 
morals be corrupted by a belief in the goodness of the 
natural man. The graver wrongs of his age — wars of 
ambition, the abuse of public justice, the hypocrisies, 
cruelties, and lethargy of the ecclesiastics, distrust of the 
intellectual movement, spurious ideals, of life — are vigor- 
ously condemned. Rabelais loves goodness, charity, 
truth ; he pleads for the right of manhood to a full and 
free development of all its powers ; and if questions of 
original sin and divine grace trouble him little, and his 
creed has some of the hardihood of the Renaissance, he 
is full of filial gratitude to le bon Dieu for His gift of life, 
and of a world in which to live strongly should be to 
live joyously. 

The influence of Rabelais is seen in the writers of 
prose tales who were his contemporaries and successors ; 
but they want his broad good sense and real tem- 
perance. Bonaventure DES Periers, whom Marguerite 
of Navarre favoured, and whose Nouvelles Recreations, 
with more of the tradition of the French fabliaux and 
farces and less of the Italian manner, have something 
in common with the stories of the Heptame'ron, died in 
desperation by his own hand about 1543. His Lucianic 
dialogues which compose the Cymbalum Mundi show 
the audacity of scepticism which the new ideas of the 



9 2 



FRENCH LITERATURE 



Renaissance engendered in ill-balanced spirits. With 
all his boldness and ardour Rabelais exercised a certain 
discretion, and in revising his own text clearly exhibited 
a desire to temper valour with prudence. 

It is remarkable that just at the time when Rabelais 
published the second and best book of his Pantagruel, in 
which the ideality and the realism of the Renaissance 
blossom to the full, there was a certain revival of the 
chivalric romance. The Spanish Amadis des Gaules 
(1540-48), translated by Herberay des Essarts, was a 
distant echo of the Romances of the Round Table. The 
gallant achievements of courtly knights, their mystical 
and platonic loves, were a delight to Francis I., and 
charmed a whole generation. Thus, for the first time, 
the literature of Spain reached France, and the influ- 
ence of Amadis reappears in the seventeenth century in 
the romances of d'Urf6 and Mdlle. de Scudery. 

If the genius of the Renaissance is expressed ardently 
and amply in the writings of Rabelais, the genius of the 
Reformation finds its highest and most characteristic 
utterance through one whom Rabelais describes as the 
"demoniacle" of Geneva — Jean Calvin (1509-64). The 
pale face and attenuated figure of the great Reformer, 
whose life was a long disease, yet whose indomitable 
will sustained him amid bodily infirmities, present a 
striking contrast to the sanguine health and overflow- 
ing animal spirits of the good physician who reckoned 
laughter among the means of grace. Yet Calvin was not 
merely a Reformer : he was also a humanist, who, in 
his own way, made a profound study of man, and who 
applied the learning of a master to the determination 
of dogma. His education was partly theological, partly 
legal ; and in his body of doctrine appear some of the 



CALVIN 93 

rigour, the severity, and the formal procedures of the 
law. Indignation against the imprisonment and burning 
of Protestants, under the pretence that they were rebel- 
lious anabaptists, drew him from obscurity ; silence, 
he thought, was treason. He addressed to the King 
an eloquent letter, in which he maintained that the 
Reformed faith was neither new nor tending towards 
schism, and next year (1536) he published his lucid 
and logical exposition of Protestant doctrine — the 
Christiana Religionis Institutio. It placed him, at the 
age of twenty-seven, as leader in the forefront of the 
new religious movement. 

But the movement was not merely learned, it was 
popular, and Calvin was resolved to present his work to 
French readers in their own tongue. His translation — 
the Institution — appeared probably in 1541. Perhaps no 
work by an author of seven-and-twenty had ever so great 
an influence. It consists of four books — of God, of Jesus 
as a Mediator, of the effects of His mediatorial work, 
and of the exterior forms of the Church. The generous 
illusion of Rabelais, that human nature is essentially 
good, has no place in Calvin's system. Man is fallen 
and condemned under the law ; all his righteousness 
is as filthy rags ; God, of His mere good pleasure, from 
all eternity predestinated some men to eternal life and 
others to eternal death ; the Son of God came to earth 
to redeem the elect ; through the operation of the Holy 
Spirit in the gift of faith they are united to Christ, are 
justified through His righteousness imputed to them, 
and are sanctified in their hearts ; the Church is the 
body of the faithful in every land ; the officers of the 
Church are chosen by the people ; the sacraments are 
two — baptism and the Lord's Supper. In his spirit of 



94 FRENCH LITERATURE 

system, his clearness, and the logical enchainment of 
his ideas, Calvin is eminently French. On the one side 
he saw the Church of Rome, with — as he held — its 
human tradition, its mass of human superstitions, in- 
tervening between the soul and God ; on the other 
side were the scepticism, the worldliness, the religious 
indifference of the Renaissance. Within the Reforming 
party there was the conflict of private opinions. Calvin 
desired to establish once for all, on the basis of the 
Scriptures, a coherent system of dogma which should 
impose itself upon the minds of men as of divine autho- 
rity, which should be at once a barrier against the 
dangers of superstition and the dangers of libertine 
speculation. As the leaders of the French Revolution 
propounded political constitutions founded on the idea 
of the rights of man, so Calvin aimed at setting forth 
a creed proceeding, if we may so put it, from a con- 
ception of the absolute rights of God. Through the 
mere good pleasure of our Creator, Ruler, Judge, we 
are what we are. 

It is not perhaps too much to say that Calvin is the 
greatest writer of the sixteenth century. He learned 
much from the prose of Latin antiquity. Clearness, 
precision, ordonnance, sobriety, intellectual energy are 
compensations for his lack of grace, imagination, sensi- 
bility, and religious unction. He wrote to convince, to 
impress his ideas upon other minds, and his austere 
purpose was attained. In the days of the pagan Re- 
naissance, it was well for France that there should also 
be a Renaissance of moral rigour ; if freedom was 
needful, so also was discipline. On the other hand, it 
may be admitted that Calvin's reason is sometimes the 
dupe of Calvin's reasoning. 



BEZE 95 

His Life was written in French by his fellow-worker in 
the Reformation, Theodore de Beze, who also recorded 
the history of the Reformed Churches in France (1580). 
Beze and Viret, together with their leader Calvin, were 
eminent in pulpit exposition and exhortation, and in 
Beze the preacher was conjoined with a poet. At 
Calvin's request he undertook his translation of the 
Psalms, to complete that by Marot, and in 1551 his 
sacred drama the Tragedie Francaise du sacrifice d 'Abra- 
ham, designed to inculcate the duty of entire surrender 
to the divine will, and written with a grave and 
restrained ardour, was presented at the University of 
Lausanne. 



CHAPTER II 

FROM THE PLEIADE TO MONTAIGNE 

The classical Renaissance was not necessarily opposed 
to high ethical ideals ; it was not wholly an afrair^of the 
sensuous imagination ; it brought with it the conception 
of Roman virtue, and this might well unite itself (as we 
see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith. \Among 
the many translators of the sixteenth century was Mon- 
taigne's early friend— the friend in memory of all his 
life — Etienne de la Boetie (1530-63). It is not, 
however, for his fragments of Plutarch or his graceful 
rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him 
the Mesnagerie) that we remember La Boetie ; it is 
rather for his eloquent pleading on behalf of freedom 
in the Discours de la Servitude Volontaire or Contrun, 
written at sixteen — revised later — in which, with the 
rhetoric of youth, he utters his invective against tyranny. 
Before La Boetie' s premature death the morals of anti- 
quity as seen in action had been exhibited to French 
readers in the pages of Amyot's delightful translation of 
Plutarch's Lives (1559), to be followed, some years later, 
by his CEuvres Morales de Plutarque. Jacques Amyot 
(1513-93), from an ill-fed, ragged boy, rose to be the 
Bishop of Auxerre. His scholarship, seen not only in 
his Plutarch, but in his rendering of the Daphnis et Chloe 
of Longus, and other works, was exquisite ; but still 



AMYOT'S PLUTARCH 



97 



more admirable was his sense of the capacities of French 
prose. He divined with a rare instinct the genius of the 
language; he felt the affinities between his Greek original 
and the idioms of his own countrymen ; he rather re- 
created than translated Plutarch. " We dunces," wrote 
Montaigne, "would have been lost, had not this book 
raised us from the mire ; thanks to it, we now venture to 
speak and write ; ... it is our breviary." The life and 
the ideas of the ancient world became the possession, 
not of scholars only, but of all French readers. The 
book was a school of manners and of thought, an in- 
spirer of heroic deeds. "To love Plutarch," said the 
greatest Frenchman of the century, Henry of Navarre, 
"is to love me, for he was long the master of my 
youth." 

It was such an interest in the life and ideas of antiquity 
as Amyot conveyed to the general mind of France that 
was wanting to Ronsard and the group of poets sur- 
rounding him. Their work was concerned primarily 
with literary form ; of the life of the world and general 
ideas, apart from form, they took too little heed. The 
transition from Marot to Ronsard is to be traced chiefly 
through the school of Lyons. In that city of the South, 
letters flourished side by side with industry and com- 
merce ; Maurice Sceve celebrated his mistress Delie, 
"object of the highest virtue," with Petrarchan ingenui- 
ties ; and his pupil LOUISE LABE, " la belle Cordiere," 
sang in her sonnets of a true passion felt, as she declares, 
" en ses os, en son sang, en son ame." The Lyonese 
poets, though imbued with Platonic ideas, rather carry 
on the tradition of Marot than announce the Pleiade. 
Pierre de Ronsard, born at a chateau a few leagues 
from Vendome, in the year 1524, was in the service of 



98 FRENCH LITERATURE 

the sons of Francis I. as page, was in Scotland with 
James V., and later had the prospect of a distinguished 
diplomatic career, when deafness, consequent on a 
serious malady, closed for him the avenue to public 
life. He threw himself ardently into the study of 
letters; in company with the boy Antoine de Bai'f he 
received lessons from an excellent Hellenist, Jean 
Daurat, soon to be principal of the College Coqueret. 
At the College a group of students — Ronsard, Ba'if, 
Joachim du Bellay, Remi Belleau — gathered about the 
master. The " Brigade " was formed, which, by-and- 
by, with the addition of Jodelle and Pontus de Thyard, 
and including Daurat, became the constellation of the 
Pleiade. The seven associates read together, translated 
and imitated the classics ; a common doctrine of art 
banded them in unity ; they thought scorn of the vulgar 
ways of popular verse ; poetry for them was an arduous 
and exquisite toil ; its service was a religion. At length, 
in 1549, they flung out their manifesto — the Defense 
et Illustration de la Langue Francaise by Du Bellay, 
the most important study in literary criticism of the 
century. With this should be considered, as less im- 
portant manifestoes, the later Art Poetique of Ronsard, 
and his prefaces to the Franciade. To formulate prin- 
ciples is not always to the advantage of a movement 
in literature ; but champions need a banner, reformers 
can hardly dispense with a definite creed. Against the 
popular conception of the ignorant the Pleiade main- 
tained that poetry was a high and difficult form of 
art ; against the pedantry of humanism they main- 
tained that the native tongue of France admitted of 
literary art worthy to take its place beside that of 
Greece or Rome. The French literary vocabulary, they 



DOCTRINE OF THE PLEIADE 99 

declared, has excellences of its own, but it needs to 
be enriched by technical terms, by words of local dia- 
lects, by prudent adoptions from Greek and Latin, 
by judicious developments of the existing families of 
words, by the recovery of words that have fallen into 
disuse. 

It is unjust to the Pleiade to say that they aimed at 
overloading poetic diction with neologisms of classical 
origin ; they sought to innovate with discretion ; but 
they unquestionably aimed at the formation of a poetic 
diction distinct from that of prose ; they turned away 
from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis ; 
they desired a select, aristocratic idiom for the service 
of verse ; they recommended a special syntax in imita- 
'011 of the Latin ; for the elder forms of French poetry 
diey would substitute reproductions or re-creations of 
classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants 
royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as epiceries ; and 
their place is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar 
or of Horace, by the elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by 
newer forms justified by the practice of Italian masters. 
Rich but not over-curious rhymes are to be cultivated, 
with in general the alternation of masculine and feminine 
rhymes ; the caesura is to fall in accordance with the 
meaning. Ronsard, more liberal than Du Bellay, per- 
mits, on the ground of classical example, the gliding 
from couplet to couplet without a pause. "The alex- 
andrine holds in our language the place of heroic 
verse among the Greeks and Romans" — in this state- 
ment is indicated the chief service rendered to French 
poetry by Ronsard and the rest of the Pleiade ; they it 
was who, by their teaching and example, imposed on 
later writers that majestic line, possessing the most 



ioo FRENCH LITERATURE 

varied powers, capable of the finest achievements, which 
has yielded itself alike to the purposes of Racine and 
to those of Victor Hugo. 

Ronsard and Du Bellay broke with the tradition of 
the Middle Ages, and inaugurated the French classical 
school ; it remained for Malherbe, at a later date, to 
reform the reformation of the Pleiade, and to win for 
himself the glory which properly belongs to his pre- 
decessors. Unfortunately from its origin the French 
classical school had in it the spirit of an intellectual 
aristocracy, which removed it from popular sympathies ; 
unfortunately, also, the poets of the Pleiade failed to 
perceive that the masterpieces of Greece and Rome are 
admirable, not because they belong to antiquity, but 
because they are founded on the imitation of nature 
and on ideas of the reason. They were regarded as 
authorities equal with nature or independent of it ; and 
thus while the school of Ronsard did much to renew 
literary art, its teaching involved an error which even- 
tually tended to the sterilisation of art. That error 
found its correction in the literature of the seventeenth 
century, and expressly in the doctrine set forth by 
Boileau ; yet under the correction some of the con- 
sequences of the error remained. Ronsard and his 
followers, on the other hand, never made the assump- 
tion, common enough in the seventeenth century, that 
poetry could be manufactured by observance of the 
rules, nor did they suppose that the total play of 
emotion must be rationalised by the understanding ; 
they left a place for the instinctive movements of poetic 
sensibility. 

During forty years Ronsard remained the " Prince of 
Poets." Tasso sought his advice; the Chancellor Michel 



RONSARD io I 

de 1' Hospital wrote in his praise; Brantome placed him 
above Petrarch ; Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart sent 
him gifts ; Charles IX. on one occasion invited him to sit 
beside the throne. In his last hours he was still occupied 
with his art. His death, at the close of 1585, was felt as a 
national calamity, and pompous honours were awarded 
to his tomb. Yet Ronsard, though ambitious of literary 
distinction, did not lose his true self in a noisy fame. 
His was the delicate nature of an artist ; his deafness 
perhaps added to his timidity and his love of retirement; 
we think of him in his garden, cultivating his roses as 
"the priest of Flora." 

His work as a poet falls into four periods. From 1550 
to 1554 he was a humanist without discretion or reserve 
In the first three books of the Odes he attempted to rival 
Pindar; in the Amours de Cassandre he emulates the 
glory of Petrarch. From 1554 to 1560, abandoning 
his Pindarism, he was in discipleship to Anacreon l and 
Horace. It is the period of the less ambitious odes 
found in the fourth and fifth books, the period of the 
Amours de Marie and the Hy nines. From 1560 to 1574 
he was a poet of the court and of courtly occasions, an 
eloquent declaimer on public events in the Discours des 
Miseres de ce Temps, and the unfortunate epic poet of his 
unfinished Franciade. During the last ten years of his 
life he gave freer expression to his personal feelings, 
his sadness, his gladness ; and to these years belong the 
admirable sonnets to Helene de Surgeres, his autumnal 
love. 

Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tenden- 
cies of a time when the great affair was the organisation 

1 i.e. the Anacreontic poems, found, and published in 1554, by Henri 
Estienne. 



102 FRENCH LITERATURE 

of social life, and as a consequence the limitation of 
individual and personal passions, were not favourable 
to the development of lyrical poetry. In his imitations 
of Pindar a narrative element checks the flight of song, 
and there is a certain unreality in the premeditated 
attempt to reproduce the passionate fluctuations and 
supposed disorder of his model. The study of Pindar, 
however, trained Ronsard in the handling of sustained 
periods of verse, and interested him in complex lyri- 
cal combinations. His Anacreontic and Horatian odes 
are far happier ; among these some of his most de- 
lightful work is found. If he was deficient in great 
ideas, he had delicacy of sentiment and an exquisite 
sense of metrical harmony. The power which he 
possessed as a narrative poet appears best in episodes 
or epic fragments. His ambitious attempt to trace 
the origin of the French monarchy from the ima- 
ginary Trojan Francus was unfortunate in its subject, 
and equally unfortunate in its form — the rhyming 
decasyllabic verse. 

In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit 
eloquence, as it were, of a poet addressing his contem- 
poraries on public matters, the utterances of a patriot 
and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows, such poetry 
as the Discours des Miseres de ce Temps and the Institution 
pour V Adolescence du Rot, Charles IX., Ronsard is original 
and impressive, a forerunner of the orator poets of the 
seventeenth century. His eclogues show a true feeling 
for external nature, touched at times by a tender sadness. 
When he escapes from the curiosities and the strain of 
his less happy Petrarchism, he is an admirable poet of 
love in song and sonnet ; no more beautiful variation on 
the theme of "gather the rosebuds while ye may" exists 



BAIF: BELLE A U 103 

than his sonnet Quand vans seres bien vieille, unless it be 
his dainty ode Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose. Passionate ; 
in the deepest and largest sense Ronsard is not ; but it was 
much to be sincere and tender, to observe just measure, 
to render a subtle phase of emotion. In the fine melan- 
choly of his elegiac poetry he is almost modern. Before 
all else he is a master of his instrument, an inventor of 
new effects and movements of the lyre ; in his hands the 
entire rhythmical system was renewed or was purified. 
His dexterity in various metres was that of a great vir- 
tuoso, and it was not the mere dexterity which conquers 
difficulties, it was a skill inspired and sustained by the 
sentiment of metre. 

Of the other members of the Pleiade, one — Jodelle — 
is remembered chiefly in connection with the history 
of the drama. Ba'i'f (1532-89), son of the French 
ambassador at Venice, translated from Sophocles and 
Terence, imitated Plautus, Petrarchised in sonnets, took 
from Virgil's Georgics the inspiration of his Mete'ores, 
was guided by the Anacreontic poems in his Passe- 
Temps, and would fain rival Theognis in his most 
original work Les Mimes, where a moral or satiric 
meaning masks behind an allegory or a fable. He 
desired to connect poetry more closely with music, and 
with this end in view thought to reform the spelling of 
words and to revive the quantitative metrical system 
of classical verse. 1 Remi Belleau (1528-77) practised 
the Horatian ode and the sonnet ; translated Anacreon ; 
followed the Neapolitan Sannazaro in his Bergerie of 
connected prose and verse, where the shepherds are 
persons of distinction arrayed in a pastoral disguise ; 

1 The " Ba'ifin verse," French not classical, is of fifteen syllables, divided 
into hemistichs of seven and eight syllables. 



104 FRENCH LITERATURE 

and adapted the mediaeval lapidary (with imitations of 
the pseudo-Orpheus) to the taste of the Renaissance in 
his Amours et Nouveaux Eschanges des Pier res Precieuses. 
These little myths and metamorphoses of gems are 
ingenious and graceful. The delicate feeling for 
nature which Belleau possessed is seen at its best 
in the charming song Avril, included in his some- 
what incoherent Bergerie. Among his papers was 
found, after his death, a comedy, La Reconnue, which, 
if it has little dramatic power, shows a certain instinct 
for satire. 

These are minor lights in the poetical constellation ; 
but the star of JOACHIM DU Bellay shines with a ray 
which, if less brilliant than that of Ronsard; has a finer 
and more penetrating influence. Du Bellay was born 
about 1525, at Lire, near Angers, of an illustrious family. 
His youth was unhappy, and a plaintive melancholy 
haunts his verse. Like Ronsard he suffered from deaf- 
ness, and he has humorously sung its praises. Olive, 
fifty sonnets in honour of his Platonic or Petrarchan 
mistress, Mdlle. de Viole (the letters of whose name 
are transposed to Olive), appeared almost at the same 
moment as the earliest Odes of Ronsard; but before 
long he could mock in sprightly stanzas the fantasies 
and excesses of the Petrarchan style. It was not until 
his residence in Rome (1551) as intendant of his cousin 
Cardinal du Bellay, the French ambassador, that he 
found his real self. In his Antiquites de Rome he ex- 
presses the sentiment of ruins, the pathos of fallen 
greatness, as it had never been expressed before. The 
intrigues, corruption, and cynicism of Roman society, his 
broken health, an unfortunate passion for the Faustina 
of his Latin verses, and the longing for his beloved 



DU BELLAY 105 

province and little Lire depressed his spirits ; in the 
sonnets of his Regrets he embodied his intimate feelings, 
and that lively spirit of satire which the baseness of the 
Pontifical court summoned into life. This satiric vein 
had, indeed, already shown itself in his mocking counsel 
to le Poete courtisan : the courtier poet is to be a gentle- 
man who writes at ease ; he is not to trouble himself 
with study of the ancients ; he is to produce only pieces 
of occasion, and these in a negligent style ; the rarer and 
the smaller they are the better ; and happily at last he 
may cease to bring forth even these. Possibly his poete 
courtisan was Melin de Saint-Gelais. As a rural poet 
Du Bellay is charming ; his Jeux Rustiques, while owing 
much to the Lusus of the Venetian poet Navagero, have 
in them the true breath of the fields ; it is his douce 
province of Anjou which inspires him ; the song to 
Venus in its happiest stanzas is only less admirable 
than the Vanneur de Ble, with which more than any 
other single poem the memory of Du Bellay is associ- 
ated. The personal note, which is in general absent 
from the poetry of Ronsard, is poignantly and ex- 
quisitely audible in the best pieces of Du Bellay. He 
did not live long enough to witness the complete 
triumph of the master ; in 1560 he died exhausted, at 
the age of thirty-five. 

The Pleiade served literature by their attention to 
form, by their skill in poetic instrumentation ; but they 
were incapable of interpreting life in any large and 
original way. In the hands of their successors poetry 
languished for want of an inspiring theme. Philippe 
Desportes (1 546-1606) was copious and skilful in his 
reproduction and imitation of Italian models ; as a 
courtier poet he reduced literary flattery to a fine art ; 



106 FRENCH LITERATURE 

but his mannered graces are cold, his pretence of 
passion is a laboured kind of esprit. A copy of his 
works annotated by the hand of Malherbe survives ; 
the comments, severe and just, remained unpublished, 
probably because the writer was unwilling to pursue 
an adversary whom death had removed from his way. 
Jean Bertaut, his disciple, is a lesser Desportes. Satire 
was developed by Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, and 
to him we owe an Art Poetique (1575) which adapts to 
his own time the teaching of Aristotle and Horace. 
More interesting than these is Jean Passerat (1534- 
1602), whose spirit is that of old France in its mirth 
and mockery, and whose more serious verse has the 
patriotism of French citizenship ; his field was small, 
but he tilled his field gaily and courageously. The 
villanelle J'ai perdu ma tourterclle and the ode on May- 
day show Passerat's art in its happiest moments. 

The way for a reform in dramatic poetry had been in 
some degree prepared by plays of the sixteenth century, 
written in Latin— the work of Buchanan, Muret, and 
others — by translations from Terence, Sophocles, Euri- 
pides, translations from Italian comedy, and renderings 
of one Spanish model, the highly-popular Celestina of 
Fernando de Rojas. The Latin plays were acted in 
schools. The first performance of a play in French 
belonging to the new tendency was that of Ronsard's 
translation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, in 1549, by 
his friends of the College de Coqueret. It was only by 
amateurs, and before a limited scholarly group of spec- 
tators, that the new classical tragedies could be presented. 
Gradually both tragedy- and comedy came to be written 
solely with a view to publication in print. The mediaeval 
drama still held the stage. 



CLASSICAL TRAGEDY 107 

Jodelle's Cleopdtre (1552), performed with enthusiasm 
by amateurs, was therefore a false start ; it was essen- 
tially literary, and not theatrical. Greek models were 
crudely imitated, with a lack of almost everything that 
gave life and charm to the Greek drama. Seneca was 
more accessible than Sophocles, and his faults were easy 
to imitate — his moralisings, his declamatory passages, his 
excess of emphasis. The so-called Aristotelian dramatic 
canons, formulated by Scaliger in his Poetic, were 
rigorously applied. Unity of place is preserved in Cleo- 
pdtre ; the time of the action is reduced to twelve hours ; 
there are interminable monologues, choral moralities, a 
ghost (in Seneca's manner), a narration of the heroine's 
death ; of action there is none, the stage stands still. 
If Jodelle's Didon has some literary merit, it has little 
dramatic vitality. The oratorical energy of Grevin's 
Jules Cesar, the studies of history in La Mort de Daire 
and La Mort d' Alexandre, by Jacques de La Taille, 
do not compensate their deficiency in the qualities re- 
quired by the theatre. One tragedy alone, La Sultane, 
by Gabriel Bounin (1561), amid its violences and ex- 
travagances, shows a feeling for dramatic action and 
scenic effect. 

Could the mediaeval mystery and classical tragedy 
be reconciled ? The Protestant Reformer Beze, in his 
Sacrifice d' Abraham, attempted something of the kind; 
his sacred drama is a mystery by its subject, a tragedy 
in the conduct of the action. Three tragedies on the 
life of David — one of them admirable in its rendering of 
the love of Michol, daughter of Saul — were published in 
1556 by Loys Des-Masures : the stage arrangements are 
those of the mediaeval drama, but the unity of time is 
observed, and chorus and semi-chorus respond in alter- 



108 FRENCH LITERATURE 

nate strains. No junction of dramatic systems essen- 
tially opposed proved in the end possible. When Jean 
de La Taille wrote on a biblical subject in his Saul le 
FurieuXj a play remarkable for its impressive concep- 
tion and development of the character of Saul, he com- 
posed it selon I' art, and in the manner of "the old 
tragic authors." He is uncompromising in his classical 
method ; the mediaeval drama seemed inartificial to him 
in the large concessions granted by the spectators to 
the authors and actors ; he would have what passes on 
the stage approximate, at least, to reality ; the unities 
were accepted not merely on the supposed authority 
of Aristotle, but because they were an aid in attaining 
verisimilitude. 

The most eminent name in the history of French 
tragedy of the sixteenth century is that of Robert 
Garnier (1534-90). His discipleship to Seneca was at 
first that of a pupil who reproduces with exaggeration 
his master's errors. Sensible of the want of movement 
in his scenes, he proceeded in later plays to accumulate 
action upon action without reducing the action to unity. 
At length, in Les Juives (1583), which exhibits the revolt 
of the Jewish King and his punishment by Nabucho- 
donosor, he attained something of true pity and terror, 
beauty of characterisation, beauty of lyrical utterance in 
the plaintive songs of the chorus. Garnier was assuredly 
a poet ; but even in Les Juives, the best tragedy of his 
century, he was not a master of dramatic art. If any- 
where he is in a true sense dramatic, it is in his example 
of the new form of tragi-comedy. Bradamante, derived 
from the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, shows not only 
poetic imagination, but a certain- feeling for the require- 
ments of the theatre. 



COMEDY 109 

Comedy in the sixteenth century, dating from Jodelle's 
Eugene, is either a development of the mediaeval farce, 
indicated in point of form by the retention of octo- 
syllabic verse, or an importation from the drama of 
Italy. Certain plays of Aristophanes, of Terence, of 
Plautus were translated ; but, in truth, classical models 
had little influence. Grevin, while professing originality, 
really follows the traditions of the farce. Jean de La 
Taille, in his prose comedy Les Corrivaux, prepared 
the way for the easy and natural dialogue of the comic 
stage. The most remarkable group of sixteenth-century 
comedies are those translated in prose from the Italian, 
with such obvious adaptations as might suit them to 
French readers, by Pierre de Larivey (1540 to after 
161 1). Of the family of the Giunti, he had gallicisecl 
his own name {Giunti, i.e. Arrives) ; and the originality 
of his plays is of a like kind with that of his name ; 
they served at least to establish an Italian tradition 
for comedy, which was not without an influence in 
the seventeenth century ; they served to advance the 
art of dialogue. If any comedy of the period stands 
out as superior to its fellows, it is Les Contents (1584), 
by Odet de Turnebe, a free imitation of Italian models 
united with something imported from the Spanish 
Celestina. Its intrigue is an Italian imbroglio ; but 
there are lively and natural scenes, such as can but 
rarely be found among the predecessors of Moliere. In 
general the comedy of the sixteenth century is wildly 
confused in plot, conventional in its types of character, 
and too often as grossly indecent as the elder farces. 
Before the century closed, the pastoral drama had been 
discovered, and received influences from both Italy and 
Spain , the soil was being prepared for that delicate 



no FRENCH LITERATURE 

flower of poetry, but as yet its nurture was little under- 
stood, nor indeed can it be said to have ever taken kindly 
to the climate of France. 

While on the one hand the tendencies of the 
Pleiade may be described as exotic, going forth, as 
they did, to capture the gifts of classical and Italian 
literature, on the other hand they pleaded strenu- 
ously that thus only could French literature attain its 
highest possibilities. In the scholarship of the time, 
side by side with the humanism which revived and 
restored the culture of Greece and Rome, was an- 
other humanism which was essentially national. The 
historical origins of France were studied for the first 
time with something of a critical spirit by Claude 
FAUCHET in his Antiquites Gauloises et Francoises 
(1579- 1 60 1 ). His Recueil de I'Origine de la Langue et 
Poesie Francoise, in spite of its errors, was an effort 
towards French philology; and in calling attention to 
the trouveres and their works, Fauchet may be con- 
sidered a remote master of the school of modern literary 
research. Estienne Pasouier (15 29-161 5), the jurist 
who maintained in a famous action the cause of the 
University against the Jesuits, in his Recherches de la 
France treated with learning and vigour various im- 
portant points in French history — civil and ecclesiastical 
— language, literary history, and the foundation of uni- 
versities. Henri Estienne (1531-98), who entered to 
the full into the intoxication of classical humanism, 
was patriotic in his reverence for his native tongue. 
In a trilogy of little treatises (1565-79), written with 
much spirit, he maintained that of modern languages 
the French has the nearest affinity to the Greek, 
attempted to establish its superiority to Italian, and 



JEAN BODIN i i r 

much more to Spanish, and mocked the contemporary 
fashion of Italianised French. 

The study of history is supported on the one hand by 
such erudite research as that of Fauchet and Pasquier; 
on the other hand it is supported by political philosophy 
and speculation. To philosophy, in the wider sense 
of the word, the sixteenth century made no large and 
coherent contribution ; the Platonism, Pyrrhonism, 
Epicureanism, Stoicism of the Renaissance met and 
clashed together - the rival theologies of the Roman and 
Reformed Churches contended in a struggle for life. 
Pierre de la Ramee (1515-72) expressed the revolt 
of rationalism against the methods of the schoolmen 
and the authority of Aristotle; but he ordinarily wrote 
in Latin, and his Dialectique, the first philosophical work 
in the vulgar tongue, hardly falls within the province of 
literary history. 

The philosophy of politics is represented by one 
great name, that of Jean Bodin (1529-96), whose Re- 
publique may entitle him to be styled the Montesquieu 
of the Renaissance. In an age which tended towards 
the formation of great monarchies he was vigorously 
monarchical. The patriarchal power of the sovereign 
might well be thought needful, in the second half of 
the century, as a barrier against anarchy ; but Bodin 
was no advocate of tyranny ; he condemned slavery, 
and held that religious persecution can only lead to a 
dissolution of religious belief. A citizen is defined by 
Bodin as a free man under the supreme government of 
another; like Montesquieu, he devotes attention to the 
adaptation of government to the varieties of race and 
climate. The attempts at a general history of France 
in the earlier part of the sixteenth century preserved 



H2 FRENCH LITERATURE 

the arid methods and unilluminated style of the medi- 
aeval chronicles ; x in the second half of the century 
they imitated with little skill the models of antiquity. 
Histories of contemporary events in Europe were 
written with conscientious impartiality by Lancelot de 
la Popeliniere, and with personal and party passion, 
struggling against his well-meant resolves, by Agrippa 
d'Aubigne. The great Historia mei Temporis of De 
Thou, faithful and austere in its record of fact, was a 
highly- important contribution to literature, but it is 
written in Latin. 

With a peculiar gift for narrative, the French have 
been long pre-eminent as writers of memoirs, and 
already in the sixteenth century such personal recitals 
are numerous. The wars of Francois I. and of Henri 
II. gave abundant scope for the display of individual 
enterprise and energy ; the civil wars breathed into the 
deeds of men an intensity of passion ; the actors had 
much to tell, and a motive for telling it each in his own 
interest. 

The Commentaires of Blaise DE MONLUC (1502-77) 
are said to have been named by Henri IV. "the 
soldier's Bible"; the Bible is one which does not 
always inculcate mercy or peace. Monluc, a Gascon of 
honourable birth and a soldier of fortune, had the 
instinct of battle in his blood ; from a soldier he rose 
through every rank to be the King's lieutenant of: 
Guyenne and a Marshal of France ; during fifty years 
he fought, as a daring captain rather than as a great 
general, amorous of danger, and at length, terribly 

1 The narrative of the life of Bayard, by his secretary, writing under the 
name of "Le Loyal Serviteuir" (1527), is admirable for its clearness, grace, 
and simplicity. 



MONLUC 113 

disfigured by wounds, he sat down, not to rest, but 
to wield his pen as if it were a sword of steel. His 
Commentaires were meant to be a manual for hardy 
combatants, and what model could he set before the 
young aspirant so animating as himself ? In his earlier 
wars against the foreign foes of his country, Monluc was 
indeed a model of military prowess; the civil wars added 
cruelty to his courage ; after a fashion he was religious, 
and a short shrift and a cord were good enough for 
heretics and adversaries of his King. An unlettered 
soldier, Monluc, by virtue of his energy of character 
and directness of speech, became a most impressive and 
spirited narrator. His Memoirs close with a sigh for 
stern and inviolable solitude. Among the Pyrenean 
rocks he had formerly observed a lonely monastery, in 
view at once of Spain and France ; there it was his wish 
to end his days. 

From the opposite party in the great religious and 
political strife came the temperate Memoirs of Lanoue, 
the simple and beautiful record of her husband's life by 
Madame de Mornay, and that of his own career, written 
in an old age of gloom and passion,by D'Aubigne. The 
ideas of Henri IV. — himself a royal author in his Lettres 
missives — are embodied in the (Economies Royales of the 
statesman Sully, whose secretaries were employed for 
the occasion in laboriously reciting his words and deeds 
as they had learnt them from their chief. The superficial 
aspects of the life of society, the manners and morals — 
or lack of morals — of the time, are lightly and brightly 
exhibited by Pierre de Bourdeille, lord of Bran- 
t6me, Catholic abbe, soldier and courtier, observer of 
the great world, gossip of amorous secrets. His Vies des 
Homines Illustres et des Grands Capitaines, his Vies des 



U4 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Dames Illustres et des Dames Galantes, and his Memoires 
contained matter too dangerous, perhaps, for publication 
during his lifetime, but the author cherished the thought 
of his posthumous renown. Brantome, wholly indifferent 
to good and evil, had a vivid interest in life ; virtue and 
vice concerned him alike and equally, if only they 
had vivacity, movement, colour ; and although, as with 
Monluc, it was a physical calamity that made him turn 
to authorship, he wrote with a naive art, an easy grace,, 
and abundant spirit. To correct and complete Bran- 
tome's narrative as it related to herself, Marguerite, 
Queen of Navarre, first wife of Henri IV., prepared her 
unfinished Memoirs, which opens the delightful series 
of autobiographies and reminiscences of women. Her 
account of the night of St. Bartholomew is justly 
celebrated; the whole record, indeed, is full of interest; 
but there were passages of her life which it was natural 
that she should pass over in silence ; her sins of 
omission, as Bayle has observed, are many. 1 

The controversies of the civil wars produced a militant 
literature, in which the extreme parties contended with 
passion, while between these a middle party, the aspirants 
to conciliation, pleaded for the ways of prudence, and, 
if possible, of peace. Franqois Hotman, the effect of 
whose Latin Franco-Gallia, a political treatise presenting 
the Huguenot demands, has been compared to that of 
Rousseau's Contrat Social, launched his eloquent invective 
against the Cardinal de Lorraine, in the Epistre envoyee au 
Tigre de la France. Hubert Languet, the devoted friend 

1 The Memoires-Journeaux of Pierre de l'Estoile are a great magazine of 
the gains of the writer's disinterested curiosity. The Lettres of D'Ossat and 
the Negotiations of the President Jeannin are of importance in the records 
of diplomacy, 



MILITANT LITERATURE 115 

of Philip Sidney, in his Vindicia contra Tyrannos, 
justified rebellion against princes who violate by their 
commands the laws of God. D'Aubigne, in his Con- 
fession de Sancy, attacked with characteristic ardour the 
apostates and waverers of the time, above the rest that 
threefold recanter of his faith, Harlay de Sancy. Marnix 
de Sainte-Aldegonde, in his Tableau des Differands de la 
Religion, mingles theological erudition with his raillery 
against the Roman communion. Henri Estienne applied 
the spirit and learning of a great humanist to religious 
controversy in the second part of his Apologia pour 
Herodote ; the marvellous tales of the Greek historian 
may well be true, he sarcastically maintains, when in 
this sixteenth century the abuses of the Roman Church 
seem to pass all belief. On the other hand, Du Perron, 
a cardinal in 1604, replied to the arguments and cita- 
tions of the heretics. As the century drew towards its 
close, violence declined ; the struggle was in a measure 
appeased. In earlier days the Chancellor, Michel de 
1' Hospital, had hoped to establish harmony between 
the rival parties ; grief for the massacre of St. Bar- 
tholomew hastened his death. The learned Duplessis- 
Mornay, leader and guide of the Reformed Churches 
of France, a devoted servant of Henri of Navarre, while 
fervent in his own beliefs, was too deeply attached to 
the common faith of Christianity to be an extreme 
partisan. The reconciliation of Henri IV. with the 
Church of Rome, which delivered France from anarchy, 
was, however, a grief to some of his most loyal sup- 
porters, and of these Duplessis-Mornay was the most 
eminent. 

The cause of Henri against the League was served by 
the manuscript circulation of a prose satire, with inter- 



1 1 6 FRENCH LITERATURE 

spersed pieces of verse, the work of a group of writers, 
moderate Catholics or converted Protestants, who loved 
their country and their King, the Satire Menipee} When 
it appeared in print (1594; dated on the title-page 1593) 
the cause was won ; the satire rose upon a wave of suc- 
cess, like a gleaming crest of bitter spray. It is a parody 
of the Estates of the League which had been ineffectually 
convoked to make choice of a king. Two Rabelaisian 
charlatans, one from Spain, one from Lorraine, offer their 
drugs for sale in the court of the Louvre ; the virtues 
of the Spanish Catholicon, a divine electuary, are mani- 
fold — it will change the blackest criminal into a spotless 
lamb, it will transform a vulgar bonnet to a cardinal's 
hat, and at need can accomplish a score of other miracles. 
Presently the buffoon Estates file past to their assembly ; 
the hall in which they meet is tapestried with grotesque 
scenes from history ; the order of the sitting is deter- 
mined, and the harangues begin, harangues in which 
each speaker exposes his own ambitions, greeds, hypo- 
crisies, and egoism, until Monsieur d'Aubray, the orator 
of the tiers e'tat, closes the debate with a speech in 
turn indignant, ironical, or gravs in its commisera- 
tion for the popular wrongs — an utterance of bourgeois 
honesty and good sense. The writers — Canon Pierre 
Leroy ; Gillot, clerk-advocate of the Parliament of Paris ; 
Rapin, a lettered combatant at Ivry ; Jean Passerat, poet 
and commentator on Rabelais ; Chrestien and Pithou, 
two Protestants discreetly converted by force of events 
— met in a room of Gillot's house, where, according to 
the legend, Boileau was afterwards born, and there con- 
cocted the venom of their pamphlet. Its wit, in spite of 

1 Varro, who to a certain extent copied from Menippus the Gadarene, had 
called his satires Saturce Menippece ; hence the title. 



DU BARTAS 117 

some extravagances and the tedium of certain pages, is 
admirable ; farce and comedy, sarcasm and moral pru- 
dence alternate ; and it had the great good fortune of a 
satire, that of coming at the lucky moment. 

The French Huguenots were not without their poets. 
Two of these — Guillaume Saluste, Seigneur du Bartas, 
and Agrippa d'Aubigne — are eminent. The fame of Du 
Bartas (1544-90) was indeed European. Ronsard sent 
him a pen of gold, and feared at a later time the rivalry 
of his renown ; Tasso drew inspiration from his verse ; 
the youthful Milton read him with admiration in the 
rendering by Sylvester ; long afterwards Goethe hon- 
oured him with praise beyond his deserts. To read his 
poems now, notwithstanding passages of vivid descrip- 
tion and passages of ardent devotional feeling, would 
need rare literary fortitude. His originality lies in the 
fact that while he was a disciple of the Pleiade, a disciple 
crude, intemperate, and provincial, he deserted Greece 
and Rome, and drew his subjects from Hebraic sources. 
Was Judith (1573), composed by the command of Jeanne 
d'Albret, has more of Lucan than of Virgil in its over-em- 
phatic style. La Sepmaine,ou la Creation en Sept Joume'es, 
appeared in 1578, and within a few years had passed 
through thirty editions. Du Bartas is always copious, 
sometimes brilliant, sometimes majestic ; but laboured 
and rhetorical description, never ending and still be- 
ginning, fatigues the mind ; an encyclopaedia of the 
works of creation weighs heavily upon the imagination ; 
we sigh for the arrival of the day of rest. 

Th£odore-Agrippa d'Aubign£ (i 550-1630) was not 
among the admirers of Du Bartas. His natural temper was 
framed for pleasure ; at another time he might have been 
known only as a poet of the court, of lighter satire, and of 



u8 FRENCH LITERATURE 

love ; the passions of the age transformed him into an 
ardent and uncompromising combatant. His classical 
culture was wide and exact ; at ten years old he translated 
the Crito ; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish were 
at his command. He might, had France been at peace 
with herself, have appeared in literature as a somewhat 
belated Ronsardist ; but his hereditary cause became his 
own. While still a child he accepted from his father, in 
presence of the withering heads of the conspirators of 
Amboise, the oath of immitigable vengeance. Pursuits, 
escapes, the camp, the battle-field, the prison, the court 
made up no small part of his life of vicissitude and of 
unalterable resolve. He roused Henri of Navarre from 
the lethargy of pleasure ; he warned the King against 
the crime of apostasy ; he dreaded the mass, but could 
cheerfully have accepted the stake. Extreme in his rage 
of party, he yet in private affairs could show good sense 
and generosity. His elder years were darkened by what 
he regarded as treason in his King, and by the falling 
away from the faith of that son who, by an irony of 
fate, became the father of Madame de Maintenon. Four 
times condemned to death, he died in exile at the age of 
eighty. 

D'Aubigne's satirical tale, Les Aventures du Baron de 
Fceneste, contrasts the man who appears — spreading his 
plumes in the sunshine of the court — with the man who 
is, the man who lives upon his estate, among his rustic 
neighbours, tilling his fields and serving his people and his 
native land. As an elegiac poet D'Aubigne is little more 
than a degenerate issue from the Pleiade. It is in his 
vehement poem of mourning and indignation and woe, 
Les Tragigues, begun in 1577 but not published till 1616, 
that his power is fully manifested. To D'Aubign6, as 



AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE 119 

its author, the characterisation of Sainte-Beuve exactly 
applies : " Juvenal du xvi. siecle, apre, austere, inexor- 
able, herisse d'hyperboles, etincelant de beautes, rache- 
tant une rudesse grossiere par une sublime energie." 
In seven books it tells of the misery of France, the 
treachery of princes, the abuse of public law and justice, 
the hres and chains of religious persecution, the venge- 
ance of God against the enemies of the saints, and 
the final judgment of sinners, when air and fire and 
water become the accusers of those who have per- 
verted the powers of nature to purposes of cruelty. 
The poem is ill composed, its rhetoric is often strained 
or hard and metallic, its unrelieved horrors oppress 
the heart ; but the cry of true passion is heard in 
its finer pages ; from amid the turmoil and smoke, 
living tongues of flame seem to dart forth which 
illuminate the gloom. The influence of Les Tragiques 
may still be felt in passages of Victor Hugo's fulgurant 
eloquence. 

In the midst of strife, however, there were men who 
pursued the disinterested service of humanity and whose 
work made for peace. The great surgeon Ambroise Pare, 
full of tolerance and deeply pious, advanced his healing 
art on the battle-field or amid the ravages of pestilence, 
and left a large contribution to the literature of science 
Bernard Palissy, a devout Huguenot, was not only the 
inventor of "rustic figulines," the designer of enamelled 
cups and platters, but a true student of nature, who would 
substitute the faithful observation of phenomena for 
vain and ambitious theory. Olivier de Serres, another 
disciple of Calvin, cultivated his fields, helped to enrich 
France by supporting Henri IV. in the introduction of 
the industry in silk, and amassed his knowledge and 



120 FRENCH LITERATURE 

experience in his admirably-written Theatre d' Agricul- 
ture. At a later date Antoine de Montchrestien, adven- 
turous and turbulent in his Protestant zeal, the writer of 
tragedies which connect the sixteenth century with the 
classical school of later years, became the advocate of 
a protectionist and a colonial policy in his Traicte' de 
l' (Economie Politique; the style of his essay towards eco- 
nomic reform has some of the passion and enthusiasm of 
a poet. 

A refuge from the troubles and vicissitudes of the time 
was sought by some in a Christianised Stoicism. Guil- 
laume du Vair (i 556-1621), eminent as a magistrate, did 
not desert his post of duty; he pleaded eloquently, as 
chief orator of the middle party of conciliation, on behalf 
of unity under Henri of Navarre. In his treatise on 
French eloquence he endeavoured to elevate the art of 
public speaking above laboured pedantry to true human 
discourse. But while taking part in the contentious pro- 
gress of events, he saw the flow of human affairs as from 
an elevated plateau. In the conversations with friends 
which form his treatise De la Constance et Consolation 
es Calamites Publiques, Du Vair's counsels are those of 
courage and resignation, not unmingled with hope. He 
rendered into French the stoical morals of Epictetus ; 
and in his own Sainte Philosophic and Philosophic Morale 
des Stoiques he endeavoured, with honest purpose, rather 
than with genius, to ally speculation to religion, and to 
show how human reason can lead the way to those ethical 
truths which are the guiding lights of conduct. 

Perhaps certitude sufficient for human life may be 
found by limitation ; a few established truths will, after 
all, carry us from the cradle to the grave ; and beyond 
the bounds of certitude lies a limitless and fascinating 



MONTAIGNE 121 

field for observation and dubious conjecture. Amid the 
multitude of new ideas which the revival of antiquity 
brought with it, amid the hot disputes of the rival 
churches, amid the fierce contentions of civil war, how 
delightful to possess one's soul in quiet, to be satisfied 
with the needful knowledge, small though it be, which is 
vouchsafed to us, and to amuse the mind with every 
opinion and every varying humour of that curious and 
wayward creature man ! And who so wayward, who so 
wavering as one's self in all those parts of our composite 
being which are subject to the play of time and circum- 
stance ? Such, in an age of confusion working towards 
clearness, an age of belligerency tending towards con- 
cord, were the reflections of a moralist, the most original 
of his century — Michel de Montaigne. 

Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, was 
born at a chateau in Perigord, in the year 1533. His 
father, whom Montaigne always remembered with affec- 
tionate reverence, was a man of original ideas. He 
entrusted the infant to the care of peasants, wishing to 
attach him to the people ; educated him in Latin as if 
his native tongue ; roused him at morning from sleep 
to the sound of music. From his sixth to his thirteenth 
year Montaigne was at the College de Guyenne, where 
he took the leading parts in Latin tragedies composed by 
Muret and Buchanan. In 1554 he succeeded his father 
as councillor in the court des aides of Perigueux, the 
members of which were soon afterwards incorporated 
in the Parliament of Bordeaux. But nature had not 
destined Montaigne for the duties of the magistracy ; 
he saw too many sides of every question ; he chose 
rather to fail in justice than in humanity. In 1565 he 
acquired a large fortune by marriage, and having lost 



122 FRENCH LITERATURE 

his father, he retired from public functions in 1570, to 
enjoy a tranquil existence of meditation, and of rambling 
through books. He had published, a year before, in 
fulfilment of his father's desire, a translation of the 
Theologia Naturalis of Raimond de Sebonde, a Spanish 
philosopher of the fifteenth century ; and now he occu- 
pied himself in preparing for the press the writings of 
his dead friend La Boetie. Love for his father and 
love for his friend were the two passions of Montaigne's 
life. From 1571 to 1580 he dwelt in retreat, in company 
with his books and his ideas, indulging his humour for 
tranquil freedom of the mind. It was his custom to 
enrich the margins of his books with notes, and his 
earliest essays may be regarded as an extension of 
such notes ; Plutarch and Seneca were, above all, his 
favourites ; afterwards, the volume which he read with 
most enjoyment, and annotated most curiously, was that 
of his own life. 

And, indeed, Montaigne's daily life, with outward 
monotony and internal variety, was a pleasant miscel- 
lany on which to comment. He was of a middle tem- 
perament, "between the jovial and the melancholic"; 
a lover of solitude, yet the reverse of morose ; choosing 
bright companions rather than sad ; able to be silent, 
as the mood took him, or to gossip ; loyal and frank ; 
a hater of hypocrisy and falsehood ; a despiser of empty 
ceremony ; disposed to interpret all things to the best ; 
cheerful among his children ; careless of exercising 
authority ; incapable of household management ; trust- 
ful and kind towards his neighbours ; indulgent in his 
judgments, yet warm in his admiration of old, heroic 
virtue. His health, which in boyhood had been robust, 
was shaken in middle life by an internal malady. He 



THE ESSAIS 



123 



travelled in the hope of finding strength, visiting Ger- 
many, Switzerland, Italy, Tyrol, and observing, with a 
serious amusement, the varieties of men and manners. 
While still absent from France, in 1581, he learned that 
he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux ; he hesitated 
in accepting an honourable but irksome public office ; 
the King permitted no dallying, and Montaigne obeyed. 
Two years later the mayor was re-elected ; it was a period 
of difficulty ; a Catholic and a Royalist, he had a heretic 
brother, and himself yielded to the charm of Henri of 
Navarre ; " for the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, for the 
Guelph a Ghibelline." When, in 1585, pestilence raged 
in Bordeaux, Montaigne's second period of office had 
almost expired ; he quitted the city, and the election of 
his successor took place in his absence. His last years 
were brightened by the friendship- — almost filial — of 
Mdlle. de Gournay, an ardent admirer, and afterwards 
editor, of the Essais. In 1592 Montaigne died, when 
midway in his sixtieth year. 

The first two books of the Essais were published by 
their author in 1580 ; in 1588 they appeared in an 
augmented text, with the addition of the third book. 
The text superintended by Mdlle. de Gournay, based 
upon a revised and enlarged copy left by Montaigne, is 
of the year 1595. 

The unity of the book, which makes no pretence to 
unity, may be found in the fact that all its topics 
are concerned with a common subject — the nature of 
man ; that the writer accepts himself as the example of 
humanity most open to his observation ; and that the 
same tranquil, yet insatiable curiosity is everywhere pre- 
sent. Man, as conceived by Montaigne, is of all creatures 
the most variable, unstable, inconstant. The species 



124 FRENCH LITERATURE 

includes the saint and the brute, the hero and the craven, 
while between the extremes lies the average man, who 
may be anything that nature, custom, or circumstances 
make him. And as the species varies indefinitely, so 
each individual varies endlessly from himself : his con- 
science controls his temperament ; his temperament 
betrays his conscience ; external events transform him 
from what he was. Do we seek to establish our moral 
being upon the rock of philosophical dogma ? The rock 
gives way under our feet, and scatters as if sand. Such 
truth as we can attain by reason is relative truth ; let 
us pass through knowledge to a wise acceptance of our 
ignorance ; let us be contented with the probabilities 
which are all that our reason can attain. The truths 
of conduct, as far as they are ascertainable, were known 
long since to the ancient moralists. Can any virtue 
surpass the old Roman virtue ? We believe in God, 
although we know little about His nature or His opera- 
tions ; and why should we disbelieve in Christianity, 
which happens to be part of the system of things under 
which we are born ? But why, also, should we pay such 
a compliment to opinions different from our own as to 
burn a heretic because he prefers the Pope of Geneva 
to the Pope of Rome ? Let each of us ask himself, 
"Que sais-je?" — "What do I really know?" and the 
answer will serve to temper our zeal. 

While Montaigne thus saps our confidence in the 
conclusions of the intellect, when they pass beyond a 
narrow bound, he pays a homage to the force of will ; 
his admiration for the heroic men of Plutarch is ardent. 
An Epicurean by temperament, he is a Stoic through 
his imagination ; but for us and for himself, who are 
no heroes, the appropriate form of Stoical virtue is 



TEACHING OF MONTAIGNE 125 

moderation within our sphere, and a wise indifference, 
or at most a disinterested curiosity, in matters which 
lie beyond that sphere. Let us resign ourselves to life, 
such as it is ; let us resign ourselves to death ; and let 
the resignation be cheerful or even gay. To spend 
ourselves in attempted reforms of the world, of society, 
of governments, is vain. The world will go its own 
way ; it is for us to accept things as they are, to observe 
the laws of our country because it is ours, to smile 
at them if we please, and to extract our private gains 
from a view of the reformers, the enthusiasts, the dog- 
matists, the credulous, the combatants ; there is one 
heroism possible for us — the heroism of good sense. 
" It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine," 
so we read on the last page of Florio's translation of 
the Essais, "for a man to know how to enjoy his being 
loyally. We seek for other conditions because we 
understand not the use of ours ; and go out of ourselves, 
forasmuch as we know not what abiding there is. We 
may long enough get upon stilts, for be we upon them, 
yet must we go with our legs. And sit we upon the 
highest throne of the world, yet sit we upon our own 
tail. The best and most commendable lives, and best 
pleasing me are (in my conceit), those which with order 
are fitted, and with decorum are ranged, to the common 
mould and human model ; but without wonder or ex- 
travagancy. Now hath old age need to be handled more 
tenderly. Let us recommend it unto that God who is 
the protector of health and fountain of all wisdom ; 
but blithe and social." And with a stanza of Epicurean 
optimism from Horace the Essay closes. 

Such, or somewhat after this fashion, is the doctrine of 
Montaigne. It is conveyed to the reader without system, 



126 FRENCH LITERATURE 

in the most informal manner, in a series of discourses 
which seem to wander at their own will, resembling a 
bright and easy conversation, vivid with imagery, en- 
livened by anecdote and citation, reminiscences from 
history, observations of curious manners and customs, 
offering constantly to view the person of Montaigne 
himself in the easiest undress. The style, although 
really carefully studied and superintended, has an air of 
light facility, hardly interposing between the author and 
his reader ; the book is of all books the most sociable, 
a living companion rather than a book, playful and 
humorous, amiable and well bred, learned without pedan- 
try, and wise without severity. 

During the last three years of his life Montaigne 
enjoyed the friendship of a disciple who was already 
celebrated for his eloquence as a preacher. Pierre 
Charron (1541-1603), legist and theologian, under the 
influence of Montaigne's ideas, aspired to be a philo- 
sopher. It was as a theologian that he wrote his book 
of the Trots Verites, which attempts to demonstrate the 
existence of God, the truth of Christianity, and the 
exclusive orthodoxy of the Roman communion. It was 
as a philosopher, in the Traits de la Sagesse, that he 
systematised the informal scepticism of Montaigne. In- 
stead of putting the question, "Que sais-je?" Charron 
ventures the assertion, "Je ne sais." He exhibits man's 
weakness, misery, and bondage to the passions ; gives 
counsel for the enfranchisement of the mind ; and 
studies the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, 
and valiance. God has created man, says Charron, to 
know the truth; never can he know it of himself or 
by human means, and one who despairs of reason is 
in the best position for accepting divine instruction ; 



CHARRON 127 

a Pyrrhonist at least will never be a heretic ; even if 
religion be regarded as an invention of man, it is an 
invention which has its uses. Not a few passages of 
the Sagesse are directly borrowed, with slight rehand- 
ling, from Montaigne and from Du Vair ; but, instead of 
Montaigne's smiling agnosticism, we have a grave and 
formal indictment of humanity ; we miss the genial 
humour and kindly temper of the master ; we miss the 
amiable egotism and the play of a versatile spirit ; we 
miss the charm of an incomparable literary style. 



BOOK THE THIRD 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



BOOK THE THIRD 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

CHAPTER I 

LITERARY FREEDOM AND LITERARY ORDER 

With the restoration of order under Henri IV. the 
delights of peace began to be felt ; a mundane society, 
polished and pleasure-loving, began to be constituted, 
and before many years had passed the influence of 
women and of the salon appeared in literature. Should 
such a society be permitted to remain oblivious to 
spiritual truth, or to repose on the pillow of scepticism 
provided by Charron and Montaigne ? Might it not be 
captured for religion, if- religion were presented in its 
most gracious aspect, as a source of peace and joy, a 
gentle discipline of the heart ? If one who wore the 
Christian armour should throw over his steel some robe 
of courtly silk, with floral adornments, might he not 
prove a persuasive champion of the Cross ? Such was 
the hope of Francois de Sales (1567-1622), Bishop 
of Geneva; when, in 1608, he published his Introduction 
a la Vie Devote. The angelic doctor charmed by his 
mere presence, his grace of person, his winning smile, 






132 FRENCH LITERATURE 

his dove's eyes ; he showed how amiable piety might 
be ; his eloquence was festooned with blossoms ; he 
strewed the path to heaven with roses ; he conquered 
by docility ; yet under his sweetness lay strength, and 
to methodise and popularise moral self -superintendence 
was to achieve much. The Traiti de l' Amour de Dien 
(1616), while it expounds the highest reaches of mystical 
devotion, yet presents religion as accessible to every 
child of God. With his tender and ardent devotion, 
something of a poet's sentiment for nature was united ; 
but mysticism and poetry were both subservient to his 
aim of regulating the conduct of the heart ; he desired 
to show how one may remain in the world, and yet not 
be of the world ; by personal converse and by his 
spiritual letters he became the director of courtiers and 
of ladies. The motto of the literary Academy which 
he founded at Annecy expresses his %^\xii—-flores fruc- 
tusque perennes — flowers for their own sake, but chiefly 
for the sake of fruit. Much of the genius for holiness 
of the courtly saint has pass:d into the volume of 
reminiscences by Bishop Camus, his companion and 
disciple — I' Esprit de Saint Francois de Sales. 

A mundane society, however, where fine gentlemen 
and ladies meet to admire and be admired, needs other 
outlets for its imagination than that of the primrose 
way to Paradise. The labour of the fields had inspired 
Olivier de Serres with the prose Georgics of his Theatre 
d Agriculture, a work directed towards utility; the romance 
of the fields, and the pastoral, yet courtly, loves of a 
French Arcady, were the inspiration of the endless prose 
bucolics found in the Astre'e of Honor£ D'Urf£. The 
Renaissance delight in the pastoral had passed from Italy 
to Spain ; through the Diana of the Spanish Montemayor 



THE ASTRE"E 133 

it passed to France. After a period of turbulent strife 
there was a fascination in visions of a peace, into which, 
if warfare entered, the strange irruption only enhanced 
an habitual calm. A whole generation waited long to 
learn the issue of the passion of Celadon and Astree. 
The romance, of which the earliest part appeared in 1610, 
or earlier, was not completely published until 1626, when 
its author was no longer living. The scene is laid in the 
fields of d'Urfe's familiar Forez and on the banks of 
the Lignon ; the time is of Merovingian antiquity. The 
shepherd Celadon, banished on suspicion of faithless- 
ness from the presence of his beloved Astree, seeks 
death beneath the stream ; he is saved by the nymphs, 
escapes the amorous pursuit of Galatea, assumes a femi- 
nine garb, and, protected by the Druid Adamas, has 
the felicity of daily beholding his shepherdess. At length 
he declares himself, and is overwhelmed with reproaches; 
true lover that he is, when he offers his body to the 
devouring lions of the Fountain of Love, the beasts 
refuse their prey ; the venerable Druid discreetly guides 
events ; Celadon's fidelity receives its reward in marriage, 
and the banks of the Lignon become a scene of universal 
joy. The colours of the Astree are faded now as those 
of some ancient tapestry, but during many years its 
success was prodigious. D'Urfe's highest honour, of 
many, is the confession of La Fontaine : — ■ 

" Et ant petit garconje lisais son rot/ian, 
Et je le lis encore ay ant la barbe grise." 

The Astree won its popularity, in part because it united 
the old attraction of a chivalric or heroic strain with that 
of the newer pastoral ; in part because it idealised the 
gallantries and developed the amorous casuistry of the 



134 FRENCH LITERATURE 

day, not without a real sense of the power of love ; in 
part because it was supposed to exhibit ideal portraits of 
distinguished contemporaries. It was the parent of a 
numerous progeny ; and as the heroic romance of the 
seventeenth century is derived in direct succession from 
the loves of Celadon and Astree, so the comic romance, 
beside all that it owes to the tradition of the esprit gaulois, 
owes something to the mocking gaiety with which d'Urfe 
exhibits the adventures and emotional vicissitudes of his 
inconstant shepherd Hylas. 

In the political and social reconstruction which fol- 
lowed the civil and religious wars, the need of discipline 
and order in literature was felt ; in this province, also, 
unity under a law was seen to be desirable. The work 
of the Pleiade had in a great measure failed ; they had 
attempted to organise poetry and its methods, and poetry 
was still disorganised. To reduce the realm of caprice 
and fantasy to obedience to law was the work of Fran- 
cois DE Malherbe. Born at Caen in 1555, he had 
published in 1587 his Larmes de Saint Pierre, an imitation 
of the Italian poem by Tansillo, in a manner which his 
maturer judgment must have condemned. It was not 
until about his fortieth year that he found his true 
direction. Du Vair, with whom he was acquainted, 
probably led him to a true conception of the nature of 
eloquence. Vigorous of character, clear in understand- 
ing, with no affluence of imagination and no excess of 
sensibility, Malherbe was well qualified for establishing 
lyrical poetry upon the basis of reason, and of general 
rather than individual sentiment. He chose the themes 
of his odes from topics of public interest, or founded 
them on those commonplaces of emotion which are 
part of the possession of all men who think and feel. 



MALHERBE 135 

If he composed his verses for some great occasion, he 
sought for no curiosities of a private imagination, but 
considered in what way its nobler aspects ought to be 
regarded by the community at large ; if he consoled a 
friend for losses caused by death, he held his personal 
passion under restraint ; he generalised, and was con- 
tent to utter more admirably than others the accepted 
truths about the brevity and beauty of life, and the 
inevitable doom of death. What he gained by such a 
process of abstraction, he lost in vivid characterisation ; 
his imagery lacks colour ; the movement of his verse 
is deliberate and calculated ; his ideas are rigorously 
enchained one to another. 

It has been said that poetry — the overflow of indi- 
vidual emotion — is overheard; while oratory — the appeal 
to an audience — is heard. The processes of Malherbe's 
art were essentially oratorical ; the lyrical cry is seldom 
audible in his verse ; it is the poetry of eloquence 
thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of 
the seventeenth century in France — its odes, its satires, 
its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes — and much of its 
prose literature are of the nature of oratory ; and for 
the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose, 
Malherbe prepared a highway. He aimed at a reforma- 
tion of the language, which, rejecting all words either 
base, provincial, archaic, technical, or over-learned and 
over-curious, should employ the standard French, pure 
and dignified, as accepted by the people of Paris. In 
his hands language became too exclusively an instru- 
ment of the intelligence ; yet with this instrument great 
things were achieved by his successors. He methodised 
and regulated versification, insisting on rich and exact 
rhymes, condemning all licence and infirmity of structure, 



1 36 FRENCH LITERATURE 

condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, neg- 
ligence in accommodating the cesura to the sense, the 
free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that 
he rendered verse mechanical ; but within the arrange- 
ment which he prescribed, admirable effects were attain- 
able by the mastery of genius. He pondered every word, 
weighed every syllable, and thought no pains ill-spent if 
only clearness, precision, the logic of ordonnance, a 
sustained harmony were at length secured ; and until 
the day of his death, in 1628, no decline in his art can 
be perceived. 

Malherbe fell far short of bsing a great poet, but 
in the history of seventeenth-century classicism, in the 
effort of the age to rationalise the forms of art, his 
name is of capital importance. It cannot be said that he 
founded a school. His immediate disciples, Maynard 
and Racan, failed to develop the movement which he 
had initiated. Maynard laid verse by the side of verse 
with exact care, and sometimes one or the other verse 
is excellent, but he lacked sustained force and flight. 
Racan had genuine inspiration ; a true feeling for nature 
appears in his dramatic pastoral, the Bergeries (1625) ; 
unhappily he had neither the culture nor the patience 
needed for perfect execution ; he was rather an admir- 
able amateur than an artist. But if Malherbe founded 
no school, he gave an eminent example, and the 
argument which he maintained in the cause of poetic 
art was at a later time carried to its conclusion by 
Boileau. 

Malherbe's reform was not accepted without opposi- 
tion. While he pleaded for the supremacy of order, 
regularity, law, the voice of Mathurin Regnier (1573- 
1613) was heard on behalf of freedom. A nephew of the 



MATHURIN REGNIER 137 

poet Desportes, Regnier was loyal to his uncle's fame 
and to the memory of the Pleiade ; if Malherbe spoke 
slightingly of Desportes, and cast aside the tradition of 
the school of Ronsard, the retort was speedy and telling 
against the arrogant reformer, tyrant of words and syl- 
lables, all whose achievement amounted to no more than 
proser de la rime et rimer de la prose. Unawares, indeed, 
Regnier, to a certain extent, co-operated with Malherbe, 
who recognised the genius of his younger adversary ; 
he turned away from languid elegances to observation 
of life and truth of feeling ; if he imitated his masters 
Horace and Ovid, or the Italian satiric poets, with whose 
writings he had become acquainted during two periods 
of residence in Rome, his imitations were not obsequious, 
like those of the Pleiade, but vigorous and original, like 
those of Boileau ; in his sense of comedy he anticipates 
some of Moliere's feeling for the humorous perversities 
of human character; his language is vivid, plain, and 
popular. The classical school of later years could not 
reject Regnier. Boileau declared that no poet before 
Moliere was so well acquainted with the manners and 
characters of men ; through, his impersonal study of life 
he is indeed classic. But his ardent nature rebelled 
against formal rule ; he trusted to the native force of 
genius, and let his ideas and passions lead him where 
they would. His satires are those of 'a painter whose 
eye is on his object, and who handles his brush with a 
vigorous discretion ; they are criticisms of society and 
its types of folly or of vice, full of force and colour, yet 
general in their intention, for, except at the poet who 
had affronted his uncle, " le bon Regnier " struck at no 
individual. Most admirable, amid much that is admir- 
able, is the picture of the old worldling Macette, whose 



138 FRENCH LITERATURE 

veil of pretended piety is gradually dropped as she dis- 
courses with growing wantonness to the maiden whom 
she would lead in the way she should not go : Macette 
is no unworthy elder of the family of Tartufe. Regnier 
confesses freely the passions of his own irregular life ; 
had it been wisely conducted, his genius might have 
carried him far ; as it was, he passed away prematurely 
at the age of forty, the victim of his own intemperate 
pursuit of pleasure. 

Still more unfortunate was the life of a younger poet, 
who, while honouring the genius of Malherbe, pro- 
nounced, like Regnier, for freedom rather than order, 
and maintained that each writer of genius should be a law 
to himself — a poet whom his contemporaries esteemed 
too highly, and whom Malherbe, and afterwards Boileau, 
unjustly depreciated — Theophile de Viau. A Hugue- 
not who had abjured his faith, afterwards pursued as a 
libertine in conduct and as a freethinker, Theophile was 
hunted, imprisoned, exiled, condemned to execution, and 
died exhausted in 1626, when only six -and -thirty years 
old. He has been described as the last lyrical poet of 
his age, and the first of the poetical exponents of the 
new preciosity. His dramatic Pyrame et Thisbe, though 
disfigured by those concetti which the Italian Marini — an 
honoured guest at the French court — and the invasion 
of Spanish tastes had made the mode, is not without 
touches of genuine pathos. The odes of Theophile are 
of free and musical movement, his descriptions of natural 
beauty are graciously coloured, his judgment in literary 
matters was sound and original ; but he lacked the 
patient workmanship which art demands, and in pro- 
claiming himself on the side of freedom as against 
order, he was retrograding from the position which 



THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET 139 

had been secured for poetry under the leadership of 
Malherbe. 

With social order came the desire for social refinement, 
and following the desire for refinement came the pretti- 
nesses and affectations of over-curious elegance. Peace 
returned to France with the monarchy of Henri IV., but 
the Gascon manners of his 'court were rude. Catherine 
de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, whose mother 
was a great Roman lady, and whose father had been 
French ambassador at Rome, young, beautiful, delicately 
nurtured, retired in 1608 from the court, and a few years 
later opened her salon of the Hotel de Rambouillet to 
such noble and cultivated persons as were willing to be 
the courtiers of womanly grace and wit and taste. The 
rooms were arranged and decorated for the purposes of 
pleasure ; the chambre bleiie became the sanctuary of polite 
society, where Arthenice (an anagram for " Catherine ") 
was the high priestess. To dance, to sing, to touch the 
lute was well ; to converse with wit and refinement was 
something more admirable ; the salon became a mart for 
the exchange of ideas ; the fashion of Spain was added 
to the fashion of Italy ; Platonism, Petrarchism, Marinism, 
Gongorism, the spirit of romance and the daintinesses of 
learning and of pedantry met and mingled. Hither came 
Malherbe, Racan, Chapelain, Vaugelas ; at a later time 
Balzac, Segrais, Voiture, Godeau ; and again, towards 
the mid-years of the century, Saint-Evremond and La 
Rochefoucauld. Here Corneille read his plays from the 
Cid to Rodogune ; here Bossuet, a marvellous boy, im- 
provised a midnight discourse, and Voiture declared he 
had never heard one preach so early or so late. 

As Julie d'Angennes and her sister Angelique attained 
an age to divide their mother's authority in the salon, its 



140 FRENCH LITERATURE 

sentiment grew quintessential, and its taste was subtilised 
well-nigh to inanity. They censured Polyeucte ; they 
found Chapelain's unhappy epic " perfectly beautiful, but 
excessively tiresome " ; they laid their heads. together over 
Descartes' Discours de la Metho.de., and profoundly admired 
the philosopher ; they were enraptured by the madrigals 
on flowers, more than three score in number, offered 
as the Guirlande de Julie on Mademoiselle's fete ; they 
gravely debated the question which should be the ap- 
proved spelling, muscadin or muscardin. In 1649 they 
were sundered into rival parties — Uranistes and Jobelins 
— -tilting in literary lists on behalf of the respective merits 
of a sonnet by Voiture and a sonnet by Benserade. The 
word precicux is said to date from 1650. The Marquise 
de Rambouillet survived Moliere's satiric comedy Les 
Precieuses Ridicules (1659) by several years. Mine., de 
Sevigne, Mine, de la Fayette, Flechier, the preacher of 
fashion, were among the illustrious personages of the 
decline of her salon. We smile at its follies and affecta- 
tions ; but, while it harmed literature by magnifying 
things that were petty, it did something to refine man- 
ners, to quicken ideas, to encourage clearness and grace 
of expression, and to make the pursuit of letters an avenue 
to social distinction. Through the Hotel de Rambouillet, 
and the salons which both in Paris and the provinces 
imitated its modes, and pushed them to extravagance > 
the influence of women on literature became a power 
for good and for eviL 

The "Works," as they were styled, of Vincent 
Voiture (1598-1648) — posthumously published — re- 
present one side of the spirit of the salon. Capable of 
something higher, he lived to exhibit his ingenuity and 
wit in little ways, now by a cleverly-turned verse, now 



PSEUDO-EPICS 141 

by a letter of gallantry. Although of humble origin, 
he was for long a presiding genius in the chambre bleue 
of Arthenice. His play of mind was unhappily without 
a subject, and to be witty on nothings puts a strain on 
wit. Voiture expends much labour on being light, much 
serious effort in attaining vanities. His letters were 
admired as models of ingenious elegance ; the life has 
long since passed from their raillery and badinage, but 
Voiture may be credited with having helped to render 
French prose pliant for the uses of pleasure. 

The dainty trifles of the school of preciosity fluttered 
at least during the sunshine of a day. Its ambitious 
epics, whatever attention they may have attracted in 
their time, cannot be said to have ever possessed real 
life. The great style is not to be attained by tagging 
platitudes with points. The Saint Louis of Lemoyne, 
the Clovis of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the Alaric of 
Scudery, the Charlemagne of Louis le Laboureur remain 
only as evidences of the vanity of misplaced ambition. 
During twenty years Jean Chapelain, a man of no mean 
ability in other fields, was occupied with his La Pucelle 
d Orleans; twelve cantos at length appeared magnifi- 
cently in 1656, and won a brief applause ; the remaining 
twelve cantos lie still inedited. The matter of history 
was too humble for Chapelain's genius ; history is en- 
nobled by an allegorical intention ; France becomes the 
soul of man ; Charles, swayed between good and evil, is 
the human will ; the Maid of Orleans is divine grace. 
The satire of Boileau, just in its severity, was hardly 
needed to slay the slain. 

In the prose romances, which are epics emancipated 
from the trammels of verse, there was more vitality, 
Bishop Camus, the friend of Francois de Sales, had 



142 FRENCH LITERATURE 

attempted to sanctify the movement which d'Urfe had 
initiated ; but the spirit of the Astree would not unite in 
a single stream with the spirit of the Introduction a la Vie 
Devote. Gomberville is remembered rather for the re- 
morseless war which he waged against the innocent con- 
junction car, never to be admitted into polite literature, 
than for his encyclopaedic romance Polexandre, in which 
geography is illustrated by fiction, as copious as it is 
fantastic ; yet it was something to annex for the first 
time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of 
adventure. Gombauld, the Beau Te'nebreux of the Hotel 
de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable 
Endymion by the supposed transparence of his allusions 
to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin relieved 
the amorous exaltations of his Ariane, a tale of the time 
of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of 
comedy. These are books on which the dust gathers 
thick in ancient libraries. 

But the romances of La CalprenEde and of Georges 
and Madeleine de Scudery might well be taken 
down by any lover of literature who possesses the 
virtue of fortitude. Since d'Urfe's day the taste for 
pastoral had declined ; the newer romance was gallant 
and heroic. Legend or history supplied its framework ; 
but the central motive was ideal love at odds with circum- 
stance, love the inspirer of limitless devotion and daring. 
The art of construction was imperfectly understood ; the 
narratives are of portentous length ; ten, twelve, twenty 
volumes were needed to deploy the sentiments and the 
adventures. In Cassandra, in Cleopdtre, in Pharamond, 
La Calprenede exhibits a kind of universal history ; 
the dissolution of the Macedonian empire, the decline 
of the empire of Rome, the beginnings of the French 



PROSE ROMANCES 143 

monarchy are successively presented. But the chief 
personages are idealised portraits drawn from the society 
of the author's time. The spirit of the Hotel de Ram- 
bouillet is transferred to the period when the Scythian 
Oroondate was the lover of Statira, daughter of Darius ; 
the Prince de Conde masks in Cleopdtre as Coriolan ; 
Pharamond is the Grand Monarch in disguise. Notwith- 
standing the faded gallantries and amorous casuistry of 
La Calprenede's interminable romances, a certain spirit of 
real heroism, offspring of .the writer's ardent imagination 
and bright southern temper, breathes through them. 
They were the delight of Mme. de Sevigne and of La 
Fontaine ; even in the eighteenth century they were the 
companions of Crebillon, and were not forgotten by 
Rousseau. 

Still more popular was Artamene, ou le Grand Cyrus. 
Mdlle. de Scudery, the " Sapho " of her Saturday salon, a 
true flr/czeuse, as good of heart and quick of wit as she 
was unprepossessing of person, supplied the sentiment 
and metaphysics of love to match the gasconading ex- 
ploits of her brother's invention. It was the time not 
only of preciosity, but of the Fronde, with its turbulent 
adventures and fantastic chivalry. Under the names of 
Medes and Persians could be discovered the adventurers, 
the gallants, the fine ladies of the seventeenth century. 
In Clelie an attempt is made to study the curiosities of 
passion ; it is a manual of polite love and elegant man- 
ners ; in its carte de Tendre we can examine the topog- 
raphy of love-land, trace the routes to the three cities of 
"Tendre," and learn the dangers of the way. Thus the 
heroic romance reached its term ; its finer spirit became 
the possession of the tragic drama, where it was purified 
and rendered sane. The modern novel had wandered 



144 FRENCH LITERATURE 

in search of its true self, and had not succeeded in the 
quest. When Gil Bias appeared, it was seen that the 
novel of incident must also be the novel of character, 
and that in its imitation of real life it could appropriate 
some of the possessions which by that time comedy 
had lost. 

The extravagances of sentiment produced a natural 
reaction. Not a few of the intimates of the Hotel de 
Rambouillet found a relief from their fatigue of fine 
manners and high-pitched emotions in the unedifying 
jests and merry tales of the tavern. A comic, convivial, 
burlesque or picaresque literature became, as it were, 
a parody of the literature of preciosity. Saint-Amand 
(1594-1661) was at once a disciple of the Italian Marini, 
the admired " Sapurnius " of the salon, author of at 
least one beautiful ode — La Solitude — breathing a gentle 
melancholy, and a gay singer of bacchic chants. Des- 
marets de Saint- Sorlin, in his comedy Les Visionnaires 
(1637), mocked the pre'cieuses, and was applauded by 
the spectators of the theatre. One of his heroines is 
hopelessly enamoured of Alexander the Great ; one is 
enamoured of poetry, and sees life as if it were material 
for the stage ; and the third is enamoured of her own 
beauty, with its imagined potency over the hearts of 
men. As early as 1622 Charles Sorel expressed, in 
his Histoire Comique de Francion, a Rabelaisian and 
picaresque tale of low life, the revolt of the esprit 
gaulois against the homage of the imagination to courtly 
shepherdesses and pastoral cavaliers. It was reprinted 
more than sixty times. In Le Berger Extravagant (1628) 
he attempted a kind of Don Quixote for his own day 
— an "anti-romance" — which recounts the pastoral follies 
of a young Parisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set 



SCARRON : FURETIERE 145 

wandering by such dreams as the Astree had inspired ; 
its mirth is unhappily overloaded with pedantry. 

The master of this school of seventeenth -century 
realism was Paul Scarron (1610-60), the comely little 
abbe, unconcerned with ecclesiastical scruples or good 
manners, who, when a paralytic, twisted and tortured 
by disease, became the husband of D'Aubigne's grand- 
daughter, destined as Madame de Maintenon to become 
the most influential woman in all the history of France. 
In his Virgile Travesti he produced a vulgar counterpart 
to the heroic epics, which their own dead-weight would 
have speedily enough borne downwards to oblivion. 
His Roman Comique (1651), a short and lively narrative 
of the adventures of a troupe of comedians strolling 
in the piovinces, contrasted with the exaltations, the 
heroisms, the delicate distresses of the ideal romance. 
The Roman Bourgeois (1666) of ANTOINE FURETIERE is 
a belated example of the group to which Francion 
belongs. The great event of its author's life was his 
exclusion from the Academy, of which he was a mem- 
ber, on the ground that he had appropriated for the 
advantage of his Dictionary the results of his fellow- 
members' researches for the Dictionary, then in progress, 
of the learned company. His Roman is a remarkable 
study of certain types of middle-class Parisian life, often 
animated, exact, effective in its satire ; but the analysis 
of a petty and commonplace world needs some relief of 
beauty or generosity to make its triviality acceptable, 
and such relief Furetiere will not afford. 

Somewhat apart from this group of satiric tales, yet 
with a certain kinship to them, lie the more fantastic 
satires of that fiery swashbuckler — "demon des braves" 
— CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1619-55), Histoire Comique 



146 FRENCH LITERATURE 

des Etats et Empire de la Lune, and Histoire Comique des 
Etats et Empire du Soleil. Cyrano's taste, caught by the 
mannerisms of Italy and extravagances of Spain, was 
execrable. To his violences of temper he added a 
reputation for irreligion. His comedy Le Pedant Joue 
has the honour of having furnished Moliere with the 
most laughable scene of the Fourberies de Scapin. The 
voyages to the moon and the sun, in which the in- 
habitants, their manners, governments, and ideas, are 
presented, mingle audacities and caprices of invention 
with a portion of satiric truth ; they lived in the 
memories of the creator of Gulliver and the creator of 
Micromegas. 



CHAPTER II 

THE FRENCH ACADEMY— PHILOSOPHY 
(DESCARTES)— RELIGION (PASCAL) 

The French Academy, an organised aristocracy of letters, 
expressed the growing sense that anarchy in literature 
must end, and that discipline and law must be recog- 
nised in things of the mind. It is one of the glories of 
Richelieu that he perceived that literature has a public 
function, and may indeed be regarded as an affair of the 
State. His own writings, or those composed under his 
direction — memoirs; letters; the Succincte Narration, 
which sets forth his policy ; the Testament, which em- 
bodies his counsel in statecraft — belong less to literature 
than to French history. But he honoured the literary 
art ; he enjoyed the drama ; he devised plots for plays, 
and found docile poets — his Society of five — to carry out 
his designs. 

In 1629 Valentin Conrart, secretary to the King, and 
one of the frequenters of the Hotel de Rambouillet, was 
accustomed to receive weekly a group of distinguished 
men of letters and literary amateurs, who read their 
manuscripts aloud, discussed the merits of new works, 
and considered questions of criticism, grammar, and 
language. Tidings of these reunions having reached 
Richelieu, he proposed that the society should receive 
an official status. By the influence of Chapelain the 



148 FRENCH LITERATURE 

objections of certain members were overcome. The 
Academie Franqaise held its first sitting on March 13, 
1634; three years later the letters patent were regis- 
tered ; the number of members was fixed at forty ; 
when vacancies occurred, new members were co-opted 
for life. Its history to the year 1652 was published 
in the following year by Pellisson, and obtained him 
admission to a chair. The functions of the learned 
company were to ascertain, as far as possible, the 
French language, to regulate grammar, and to act as 
a literary tribunal if members consented to submit their 
works to its examination. There were hopes that autho- 
ritative treatises on rhetoric and poetics might be issued 
with its sanction ; but these hopes were not fulfilled. A 
dictionary, of which Chapelain presented the plan in 
1638, was, however, undertaken ; progressing by slow 
degrees, the first edition appeared in 1694. Its aim was 
not to record every word of which an example could 
be found, but to select those approved by the usage of 
cultivated society and of the best contemporary or recent 
authors. Thus it tended to establish for literary use an 
aristocracy of words ; and while literary expression gained 
in dignity and intellectual precision, gained as an instru- 
ment of reason and analysis, such regulation created a 
danger that it might lose in elements that have affinities 
with the popular mind — vivacity, colour, picturesqueness, 
variety. At its commencement no one was more deeply 
interested in the dictionary than Vaugelas (1585-1650), 
a gentleman of Savoie, whose concern for the purity 
of the language, as determined by the best usage, led 
him to resist innovations and the invasion of foreign 
phraseology. His Remarques sur la Langue Franqaise 
served as a guide to his fellow-members of the Academy. 



BALZAC 149 

Unhappily he was wholly ignorant of the history of the 
language. With the erudite Chapelain he mediated 
between the scholarship and the polite society of the 
time. But while Vaugelas was almost wholly occupied 
with the vocabulary and grammar, Chapelain did much 
to enforce the principles of the classical school upon 
literary art. The Academy took up the work which 
the salons had begun ; its spirit was more robust and 
masculine than theirs; it was freer from passing fashions, 
affectations, prettinesses; it leaned on the side of intellect 
rather than of sentiment. 

In what may be called the regulation of French prose 
the influence of Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1594- 
1654) was considerable. He had learnt from Malherbe 
that a literary craftsman should leave nothing to chance, 
that every effect should be exactly calculated. It was 
his task to apply to prose the principles which had 
guided his master in verse. His Lettres, of which a 
first series appeared in 1624, and a second twelve years 
later, are not the spontaneous intercourse of friend with 
friend, but rather studious compositions which deal with 
matters of learning, literature, morals, religion, politics, 
events, and persons of the time. Their contents are of 
little importance ; Balzac was not an original thinker, 
but he had the art of arranging his ideas, and of ex- 
pressing them in chosen words marshalled in ample 
and sonorous sentences. A certain fire he had, a 
limited power of imagination, a cultivated judgment, a 
taste, which suffered from bad workmanship ; a true 
affection for rural life. These hardly furnished him 
with matter adequate to support his elevated style. 
His letters were regarded as models of eloquence ; but 
it is eloquence manufactured artificially and applied to 



159 FRENCH LITERATURE 

subjects, not proceeding from them. His Prince, a 
treatise on the virtues of kings, with a special refer- 
ence to Louis XI II., was received coldly. His Aristippe, 
which dealt with the manners and morals of a court, 
and his Socrate Chretien, a study in ethics and theology, 
were efforts beyond his powers. His gift to literature 
was a gift of method and of style ; others who worked 
in marble learned something from his studious model- 
lings in clay. 

To regulate thought required an intellect of a different 
order from that of Balzac, " emperor of orators." It was 
the task of RenE Descartes (1596-1650). A child of 
delicate health, born at La Haye, near Tours, he became, 
under Jesuit teachers, a precocious student both in lan- 
guages and science. But truth, not erudition, was the 
demand and the necessity of his mind. Solitary investi- 
gations in mathematics were for a time succeeded by 
the life of a soldier in the Netherlands and Holland. The 
stream of thought was flowing, however, underground. 
Suddenly it emerged to light. In 1619, when the young 
volunteer was in winter quarters at Neuburg, on the 
Danube, on a memorable day the first principles of a 
new philosophical method presented themselves to his 
intellect, and, as it were, claimed him for their interpreter. 
After wanderings through various parts of Europe, and 
a period of studious leisure in Paris, he chose Holland 
for his place of abode (1629), and though often shifting 
his residence, little disturbed save by the controversies of 
philosophy and the orthodox zeal of Dutch theologians, 
he gave his best hours during twenty years to thought. 
An invitation from Queen Christina to the Swedish court 
was accepted in 1649. The change in his habits and the 
severity of a northern winter proved fatal to the health 



DESCARTES i 5 1 

which Descartes had carefully cherished ; in February 
of 1650 he was dead. 

The mathematical cycle in the development of Des- 
cartes' system of thought preceded the metaphysical. 
His great achievements in analytical geometry, in optics, 
in physical research, his explanation of the laws of nature, 
and their application in his theory of the material universe 
belong to the history of science. Algebra and geometry 
led him towards his method in metaphysical speculation. 
How do all primary truths verify themselves to the human 
mind ? By the fact that an object is clearly and distinctly 
conceived. The objects of knowledge fall into certain 
groups or series ; in each series there is some simple 
and dominant element which may be immediately ap- 
prehended, and in relation to which the subordinate 
elements become intelligible. Let us accept nothing on 
hearsay or authority ; let us start with doubt in order to 
arrive at certitude ; let us test the criterion of certitude to 
the uttermost. There is one fact which I cannot doubt, 
even in doubting all — I think, and if I think, I exist — "Je 
pense, done je suis." No other evidence of this is needed 
than that our conception is clear and distinct; in this 
clearness and distinctness we find the principle of certi- 
tude. Mind, then, exists, and is known to us as a thinking 
substance. But the idea of an infinite, perfect Being is 
also present to our intellect ; we, finite, imperfect beings, 
could not have made it ; unmake it we cannot ; and in 
the conception of perfection that of existence is involved. 
Therefore God exists, and therefore the laws of our 
consciousness, which are His laws, cannot deceive us. 
We have seen what mind or spirit signifies — a thinking 
substance. Reduce our idea of matter to clearness and 
distinctness, and what do we find ? The idea of an 



152 FRENCH LITERATURE 

extended substance. Our complex humanity, made up' 
of soul and body, comprises both kinds of substance. 
But thought and extension have nothing in common ; 
their union can only be conceived as the collocation 
at a single point of a machine with that which raises it 
above a mere machine. As for the lower animals, they 
are no more than automata. 

Descartes' Principia and his Meditationes were written 
in Latin. The Discours de la Methode (1637) an d the 
later Traite des Passions showed how the French lan- 
guage could be adapted to the purposes of the reason. 
Such eloquence as is found in Descartes is that of 
thought illuminating style. The theory of the passions 
anticipates some of the tendencies of modern psycho- 
logy in its physical investigations. No one, however, 
affirmed more absolutely than Descartes the freedom of 
the will — unless, indeed, we regard it as determined by 
God : it cannot directly control the passions, but it can 
indirectly modify them with the aid of imagination ; it 
is the supreme mistress of action, however the passions 
may oppose its fiat. Spiritualist as he was, Descartes 
was not disposed to be the martyr of thought. Warned 
by the example of Galileo, he did not desire to expose 
himself to the dangers attending heretical opinions. He 
separated the province of faith from that of reason : " I 
revere our theology/' he said ; but he held that theology 
demanded other lights than those of the unaided powers 
of man. In its own province, he made the reason his 
absolute guide, and with results which theologians might 
regard as dangerous. 

The spirit of Descartes' work was in harmony with 
that of his time, and reacted upon literature. He sought 
for general truths by the light of reason ; he made clear- 



MALEBRAMCHE 153 

ness a criterion of truth ; he proclaimed man a spirit ; 
he asserted the freedom of the will. The art of the 
classical period sought also for general truths, and sub- 
ordinated imagination to reason. It turned away from 
ingenuities, obscurities, mysteries ; it was essentially 
spiritualist ; it represented the crises and heroic victories 
of the will. 

Descartes' opponent, Pierre Gassendi (1592 -1655), 
epicurean in his physics, an empiricist, though an in- 
consistent one, in philosophy, chose the Latin language 
as the vehicle for his ideas. A group of writers whose 
tendencies were towards sensualism or scepticism, viewed 
him as their master. Chapelle in verse, La Mothe le 
Vayer in prose, may serve as representatives of art sur- 
rendering itself to vulgar pleasures, and thought doubting 
even its doubts, and finding repose in indifference. 

The true successor of Descartes in French philosophy, 
eminent in the second half of the century, was Nicolas 
DE Malebranche (1638-1715). Soul and body, Des- 
cartes had shown, are in their very nature alien each 
from the other. How then does the soul attain a know- 
ledge of the external world ? In God, the absolute 
substance, are the ideas of all things ; in God we behold 
those ideas which matter could never convey to us, and 
which we could never ourselves originate ; in God we 
see and know all things. The Recherche de la Verite 
(1674-75) was admirably written and was widely read. 
The theologians found it dangerous ; and when six years 
later Malebranche published his Traite de la Nature et de 
la Grace, characterised briefly and decidedly by Bossuet as 
" pulchra, nova, falsa," at Bossuet's request both Arnauld 
and Fenelon attempted to refute "the extravagant Ora- 
torian." His place in the evolution of philosophy lies 



154 FRENCH LITERATURE 

between Descartes and Spinoza, who developed and com- 
pleted the doctrine of Descartes. In the transition from 
dualism to monism Malebranche served as a mediator. 

Religious thought in the seventeenth century, wedded 
to an austere morality, is expressed by the writers of 
Port-Royal, and those who were in sympathy with them. 
They could not follow the flowery path of piety — not the 
less the narrow path because it was cheerful — pointed 
out by St. Francois de Sales. Between nature and grace 
they saw a deep and wide abyss. In closest connection 
with them was one man of the highest genius — author 
of the Provinciates and the Pensees — whose spiritual 
history was more dramatic than any miracle-play or 
morality of the Middle Ages. 

Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand in 
1623. His father, a president of the Court of Aids at 
Clermont, a man of intellect and character, guided his 
education in languages, natural science, and mathematics. 
The boy's precocity was extraordinary ; at sixteen he had 
written a treatise on Conic Sections, which excited the 
astonishment of Descartes. But the intensity of study, 
preying upon a nervous constitution, consumed his 
health and strength ; at an early age he suffered from 
temporary paralysis. When about twenty-three he fell 
under the religious influences of certain disciples of St. 
Cyran, read eagerly in the ' writings of Jansen and 
Arnauld, and resolved to live for God alone. Eut to 
restore his health he was urged to seek recreation, and 
by degrees the interests and pleasures of the world 
took hold upon him ; the master of his mind was the 
sceptical Montaigne ; he moved in the mundane society 
of the capital; and it has been conjectured from hints 
in his Discours sur les Passions de I' Amour that he loved 



PASCAL i 5 5 

the sister of his friend, the Due de Roannez, and had 
the vain hope of making her his wife. 

The spirit of religion, however, lived within his heart, 
and needed only to be reawakened. The reawakening 
came in 1654 through the persuasions of his sister, 
Jacqueline, who had abandoned the world two years 
previously, and entered the community of Port-Royal. 
The abbey of Port-Royal, situated some seven or eight 
miles from Versailles, was presided over by Jacqueline 
Arnauld, the Mere Angelique, and a brotherhood of 
solitaries, among whom were several of the Arnauld 
family, had settled in the valley in the year 1637. With 
this unvowed brotherhood Pascal, though never actually 
a solitary, associated himself at the close of 1654. An 
escape from sudden danger in a carriage accident, 
and a vision or ecstasy which came to him, co-operated 
in his conversion. After his death, copies of a frag- 
mentary and passionate writing referring to this period 
— the so-called " amulet " of Pascal — were found upon 
his person ; its words, " renonciation totale et douce," 
and "joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie," express something 
of his resolution and his rapture. 

The affair of the Provinciates, and the design of an 
apology for Christianity with which his Pensees are 
connected, together with certain scientific studies and 
the deepening passion of religion, make up what re- 
mained of Pascal's life. His spirit grew austere, but in 
his austerity there was an inexpressible joy. Exhausted 
by his ascetic practices and the inward flame of his 
soul, Pascal died on August 19, 1662. " May God never 
leave me " were his last words. 

With Pascal's work as a mathematician and a physicist 
we are not here concerned. In it "we see," writes a 



156 FRENCH LITERATURE 

scientific authority, "the strongest marks of a great 
original genius creating new ideas, and seizing upon, 
mastering, and pursuing further everything that was 
fresh and unfamiliar in his time. After the lapse of 
more than two hundred years, we can still point to 
much in exact science that is absolutely his ; and we 
can indicate infinitely more which is due to his in- 
spiration." 

Jansenism and Jesuitism, opposed as they were, have 
this in common, that both were movements in that 
revival of Roman Catholicism which was stimulated by 
the rivalry of the Protestant Reformation. But the 
Jesuits sought to win the world to religion by an art 
of piety, in which a system of accommodation was 
recognised as a means of drawing worldlings to the 
Church ; the Jansenists held up a severe moral ideal, 
and humbled human nature in presence of the absolute 
need and resistless omnipotence of divine grace. Like 
the Jesuits, but in a different spirit, the Port-Royalists 
devoted themselves much to the task of education. They 
honoured classical studies ; they honoured science, dia- 
lectics, philosophy. Their grammar, logic, geometry 
were substantial additions to the literature of pedagogy. 
Isaac le Maistre de Sacy and others translated and 
annotated the Bible. Their theologian, moralist, and 
controversialist, Pierre Nicole (1625-95), author of 
Essais de Morale (1671), if not profound or brilliant, was 
the possessor of learning, good sense, good feeling, and 
religious faith. Under the influence of St. Cyran, the 
Port-Royalists were in close sympathy with the teaching 
of Jansen, Bishop of Ypres ; the writings of their great 
theologian Antoine Arnauld were vigorously anti- Jesu- 
itical. In 1653 five propositions, professedly extracted 



THE "LETTRES PROVINCIALES" 157 

from Jansen's Augustimis, were condemned by a Papal 
bull. The insulting triumph of the Jesuits drew Arnauld 
again into controversy ; and on a question concerning 
divine grace he was condemned in January 1656 by the 
Sorbonne. "You who are clever and inquiring" (curieux), 
said Arnauld to Pascal, " you ought to do something." 
Next day was written the first of Pascal's Lettres a un 
Provincial, and on 23rd January it was issued to the 
public ; a second followed within a week ; the success 
was immense. The writer concealed his identity under 
the pseudonym " Louis de Montalte." 

The Lettres Provinciales are eighteen in number. The 
first three and the last three deal with the affair of 
Arnauld and the Sorbonne, and the questions under 
discussion as to the nature and the need of divine 
grace. In the opening letters the clearest intellectual 
insight and the deepest seriousness of spirit are united 
with the finest play of irony, and even with the temper 
of comedy. The supposed Louis de Montalte, seeking 
theological lights from a doctor of the Sorbonne, finds 
only how hopelessly divided in opinion are the opponents 
of Arnauld, and how grotesquely they darken counsel 
with speech. In the twelve letters intervening between 
the third and the sixteenth, Pascal takes the offensive, 
and deploys an incomparably skilful attack on the moral 
theology of the Jesuits. For the rigid they may have a 
stricter morality, but for the lax their casuistry supplies 
a pliable code of morals, which, by the aid of ingenious 
distinctions, can find excuses for the worst of crimes. 
With force of logic, with fineness of irony, with energy 
of moral indignation, with a literary style combining 
strength and lightness, Pascal presses his irresistible, 
assault. The effect of the " Provincial Letters" was to 



158 FRENCH LITERATURE 

carry the discussion of morals and theology before a 
new court of appeal — not the Sorbonne, but the public 
intelligence and the unsophisticated conscience of men. 
To French prose they added a masterpiece and a 
model. 

The subject of the Provinciates is in part a thing of the 
past ; the Pensees deal with problems which can never 
lose their interest. Among Pascal's papers were found, 
after his early death, many fragments which his sister, 
Madame Perier, and his friends recognised as of rare 
value ; but the editors of the little volume which ap- 
peared in 1670, imagining that they could safeguard its 
orthodoxy, and even amend its style, freely omitted and 
altered what Pascal had written. It was not until 1844 
that a complete and genuine text was established in the 
edition of M. Faugere. We can hardly hope to arrange 
the fragments so as to exhibit the design of that apology 
for Christianity, with which many of them were doubt- 
less connected, but the main outlines of Pascal's body of 
thought can be clearly discerned. 

The intellect of Psfecal, so powerful in its grasp of 
scientific truth, could find by its own researches no 
certitude in the sphere of philosophy and religion. He 
had been deeply influenced by the sceptical mind of 
Montaigne. He found within him a passionate craving 
for certitude ; man is so constituted that he can never 
be at rest until he rests in knowledge of the truth ; but 
man, as he now exists, is incapable of»ascertaining truth; 
he is weak and miserable, and yet the very consciousness 
of his misery is evidence of his greatness ; " Nature 
confounds the Pyrrhonist, and reason the dogmatist;" 
** Man is but a reed, the feeblest of created things, but 
a reed which thinks." How is this riddle of human 



PASCAL'S "PENSEES" 159 

nature to be explained ? Only in one way — by a recog- 
nition of the truth taught by religion, that human nature 
is fallen from its true estate, that man is a dethroned 
king. And how is the dissonance in man's nature to be 
overcome ? Only in one way — through union with God 
made man ; with Jesus Christ, the centre in which alone 
we find our weakness and the divine strength. Through 
Christ man is abased and lifted up — abased without de- 
spair, and lifted up without pride ; in Him all contradic- 
tions are reconciled. Such, in brief, is the vital thought 
from which Pascal's apologetic proceeds. It does not 
ignore any of the external evidences of Christianity; but 
the irresistible evidence is that derived from the problem 
of human nature and the essential needs of the spirit — ■ 
a problem which religion alone can solve, and needs 
which Christ alone can satisfy. Pascal's "Thoughts" 
are those of an eminent intelligence. But they are more 
than thoughts ; they are passionate lyrical cries of a 
heart which had suffered, and which had found more 
than consolation ; they are the interpretation of the 
words of his amulet — "Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie." 
The union of the ardour of a poet or a saint with the 
scientific rigour of a great geometer, of wit and brilliance 
with a sublime pathos, is among the rarest phenomena 
in literature ; all this and more is found in Pascal. 



CHAPTER III 

THE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE) 

The classical and Italian drama of the sixteenth century 
was literary, oratorical, lyrical ; it was anything but 
dramatic. Its last representative, Antoine de Mont- 
chrestien (1575-1621), a true poet, and one whose life 
was a series of strange adventures, wrote, like his pre- 
decessors, rather for the readers of poetry than for the 
theatre. With a gift for style, and a lyrical talent, seen 
not only in the chants of the chorus, but in the general 
character of his dramas, he had little feeling for life 
and movement ; his personages expound their feelings 
in admirable verse ; they do not act. He attempted a 
tragedy — L'Ecossaise — on the story of Mary, Queen of 
Scots, a theme beyond his powers. In essentials he 
belonged rather to the past, whose traditions he in- 
herited, than to the future of the stage. But his feeling 
for grandeur of character, for noble attitudes, for the 
pathetic founded on admiration, and together with these 
the firm structure of his verse, seem to warrant one in 
thinking of him as in some respects a forerunner of 
Corneille. 

At the Hotel de Bourgogne, until 1599, the Confreres 
de la Passion still exhibited the mediaeval drama. It 
passed away when their theatre was occupied by the 
company of Valleran Lecomte, who had in his pay a 



ALEXANDRE HARDY 161 

dramatist of inexhaustible fertility — Alexandre Hardy 
(c. 1560 to c. 1630). During thirty years, from the open- 
ing of the seventeenth century onwards, Hardy, author 
of some six or seven hundred pieces, of which forty-one 
remain, reigned as master of the stage. 1 A skilful impro- 
visor, devoid of genius, devoid of taste, he is the founder 
of the French theatre ; he first made a true appeal to 
the people ; he first showed a true feeling for theatrical 
effects. Wherever material suitable for his purposes 
could be caught at — ancient or modern, French, Italian, 
or Spanish — Hardy made it his own. Whatever form 
seemed likely to win the popular favour, this he accepted 
or divined. The Astree had made pastoral the fashion ; 
Hardy was ready with his pastoral dramas. The Italian 
and Spanish novels were little tragi-comedies waiting 
to be dramatised ; forthwith Hardy cast them into a 
theatrical mould. Writing for the people, he was not 
trammelled by the unities of time and place ; the medi- 
aeval stage arrangements favoured, romantic freedom. 
In his desire to please a public which demanded anima- 
tion, action, variety, Hardy allowed romantic incident 
to predominate over character ; hence, though he pro- 
duced tragedies founded on legendary or historical sub- 
jects, his special talent is seen rather in tragi-comedy. 
He complicated the intrigue, he varied the scenes, he 
shortened the monologues, he suppressed or reduced 
the chorus — in a word, the drama in his hands ceased 
to be oratorical or lyrical, and became at length dramatic. 
The advance was great ; and it was achieved by a hack 
playwright scrambling for his crusts of bread. 

But to dramatic life and movement it was necessary 
that order, discipline, regulation should be added. The 

1 Or thirty-four pieces, if Theaglne et Cariclee be reckoned as only one. 



1 62 FRENCH LITERATURE 

rules of the unities were not observed by Hardy — were 
perhaps unknown to him. But they were known to 
others. Jean de Schelandre (the pseudonym formed 
from the letters of his name being Daniel d'Ancheres), 
in his vast drama in two parts, Tyr et Sidon, claimed all 
the freedom of the mysteries in varying the scene, in 
mingling heroic matter with buffoonery. In the edition 
of 1628 a preface appears by Frangois Ogier, a learned 
churchman, maintaining that the modern stage, in ac- 
cordance with altered circumstances, should maintain its 
rights to complete imaginative liberty against the autho- 
rity of the Greeks, who presented their works before 
different spectators under different conditions. Ogier's 
protest was without effect. Almost immediately after its 
appearance the Sophonisbe of Jean de Mairet was given, 
and the classical tragedy of France was inaugurated on 
a popular stage. In the preface to his pastoral tragi- 
comedy Sylvanire, Mairet in 163 1 formulated the doctrine 
of the unities. The adhesion of Richelieu and the advo- 
cacy of Chapelain insured their triumph. The "rules" 
came to be regarded as the laws of a literary species. 

The influence of the Spanish drama, seen in the writ- 
ings of Rotrou and others, might be supposed to make 
for freedom. It encouraged romantic inventions and 
ambitious extravagances of style. Much that is rude 
and unformed is united with a curiosity for points and 
laboured ingenuity in the dramatic work of Scudery, 
Du Ryer, Tristan l'Hermite. A greater dramatist than 
these showed how Spanish romance could coalesce with 
French tragedy in a drama which marks an epoch — 
the Cid ; and the Cid, calling forth the judgment of the 
Academy, served to establish the supremacy of the so- 
called rules of Aristotle. 



PIERRE CORNEILLE 163 

Pierre Corneille, son of a legal official, was born 
at Rouen in 1606. His high promise as a pupil of the 
Jesuits was not confirmed when he attempted to practise 
at the bar ; he was retiring, and spoke with difficulty. 
At twenty-three his first dramatic piece, Mettle, a comedy, 
suggested, it is told, by an adventure of his youth, was 
given with applause in Paris ; it glitters with points, and 
is of a complicated intrigue, but to contemporaries the 
plot appeared less entangled and the style more natural 
than they seem to modern readers. The tragi-comedy, 
Clitandre, which followed (1632), was a romantic drama, 
crowded with extravagant incidents, after the manner of 
Hardy. In La Veuve he returned to the style of Mettle, 
but with less artificial brilliance and more real vivacity ; 
it was published with laudatory verses prefixed, in one of 
which Scudery bids the stars retire for the sun has risen. 
The scene is laid in Paris, and some presentation of con- 
temporary manners is made in La Galerie du Palais and 
La Place Royale. It was something to replace the nurse 
of elder comedy by the soubrette. The attention of 
Richelieu was attracted to the new dramatic author ; 
he was numbered among the five gargons poetes who 
worked upon the dramatic plans of the Cardinal ; but 
he displeased his patron by his imaginative independ- 
ence. Providing himself with a convenient excuse, 
Corneille retired to Rouen. 

These early works were ventures among which the 
poet was groping for his true way. He can hardly be 
said to have found it in Medee (1635), but it was an 
advance to have attempted tragedy; the grandiose style 
of Seneca was a challenge to his genius ; and in the 
famous line — 

" Dans un si grand revers, que vous reste-t-il ? Moi I " 



1 64 FRENCH LITERATURE 

we- see the flash of his indomitable pride of will, we 
hear the sudden thunder of his verse. An acquaint- 
ance, M. de Chalon, who had been one of the household 
of Marie de Medicis, directed Corneille to the Spanish 
drama. The Illusion Comique, the latest of his tentative 
plays, is a step towards the Cid ; its plot is fantastical, 
but in some of the fanfaronades of the braggart Mata- 
more, imported from Spain, are pseudo-heroics which 
only needed a certain transposition to become the lan- 
guage of chivalric heroism. The piece closes with a 
lofty eulogy of the French stage. 

The sun had indeed risen and the stars might dis- 
appear when in the closing days of 1636 the Cid was 
given in Paris at the Theatre du Marais ; the eulogy of 
the stage was speedily justified by its author. His subject 
was found by Corneille in a Spanish drama, Las Moce- 
dades del Cid, by Guilhem de Castro ; the treatment was 
his own ; he reduced the action from that of a chronicle- 
history to that of a tragedy ; he centralised it around 
the leading personages ; he transferred it in its essen- 
tial causes from the external world of accident to the 
inner world of character ; the critical events are moral 
events, victories of the soul, triumphs not of fortune 
but of the will. And thus, though there are epic epi- 
sodes and lyric outbreaks in the play, the Cid defi- 
nitely fixed, for the first time in France, the type of 
tragedy. The central tragic strife here is not one of 
rival houses. Rodrigue, to avenge his father's wrong, 
has slain the father of his beloved Chimene ; Chimene 
demands from the King the head of her beloved 
Rodrigue. In the end Rodrigue's valour atones for 
his offence. The struggle is one of passion with 
honour or duty ; the fortunes of the hero and heroine 



THE CID: HORACE 165 

are' affected by circumstance, but their fate lies in their 
own high hearts. 

The triumph of Corneille's play was immense. The 
Cardinal, however, did not join in it. Richelieu's in- 
tractable poet had glorified Spain at an inconvenient 
moment ; he had offered an apology for the code of 
honour when edicts had been issued to check the rage 
of the duel ; yet worse, he had not been crushed by 
the great man's censure. The quarrel of the Cid, in 
which Mairet and Scudery took an embittered part, was 
encouraged by Richelieu. He pressed the Academy, 
of which Corneille was not a member until 1647, 
for a judgment upon the piece, and at length he was 
partially satisfied by a pronouncement, drawn up by 
Chapelain, which condemned its ethics and its violation 
of dramatic proprieties, yet could not deny the author's 
genius. Corneille was deeply discouraged, but prepared 
himself for future victories. 

Until 1640 he remained silent. In that illustrious 
year Horace and Cinna were presented in rapid succes- 
sion. From Spain, the land of chivalric honour, the 
dramatist passed to antique Rome, the mother and the 
nurse of heroic virtue. In the Cid the dramatic con- 
flict is between love and filial duty ; in Horace it is 
between love, on the one side, united with the domestic 
affections, and, on the other, devotion to country. In 
both plays the inviolable will is arbiter of the conten- 
tion. The story of the Horatii and Curiatii, as told by 
Livy, is complicated by the union of the families through 
love and marriage; but patriotism requires the sacrifice 
of the tenderer passions. It must be admitted that the 
interest declines after the third act, and that our sym- 
pathies are alienated from the younger Horace by the 



1 66 FRENCH LITERATURE 

murder of a sister ; we are required to feel that a private 
crime, the offence of overstrained patriotism, is obliterated 
in the glory of the country. In Cinna we pass from regal 
to imperial Rome ; the commonwealth is represented by 
Augustus; a great monarchy is glorified, but in the noblest 
way, for the highest act of empire is to wield supreme 
power under the sway of magnanimity, and to remain 
the master of all self-regarding passions. The con- 
spiracy of Cinna is discovered ; it is a prince's part to 
pardon, and Augustus rises to a higher empire than that 
of Rome by the conquest of himself. In both Horace 
and Cinna there are at times a certain overstrain, an 
excess of emphasis, a resolve to pursue heroism to all 
extremities ; but the conception of moral grandeur is 
genuine and lofty ; the error of Corneille was the error 
of an imagination enamoured of the sublime. 

But are there not heroisms of religion as pure as those 
of patriotism ? And must we go back to pagan days 
to find the highest virtue ? Or can divine grace effect 
no miracles above those of the natural will ? Corneille 
gives his answer to such a challenge in the tragedy 
of Polyeucte (1643). It is the story of Christian mar- 
tyrdom ; a homage rendered to absolute self-devotion 
to the ideal; a canticle intoned in celebration of heavenly 
grace. Polyeucte, the martyr, sacrifices to his faith not 
only life, but love ; his wife, who, while she knew him 
imperfectly, gave him an imperfect love, is won both 
for God and for her husband by his heroism ; she is 
caught away from her tenderness for Severe into the 
flame of Polyeucte's devout rapture ; and through her 
Severe himself is elevated to an unexpected magnanimity. 
The family, the country, the monarchy, religion — these 
in turn were honoured by the genius of Corneille. He 






LE MENTEUR 167 

had lifted the drama from a form of loose diversion 
to be a great art ; he had recreated it as that noblest 
pastime whose function is to exercise and invigorate 
the soul. 

The transition from Polyeucte to Le Menteur, of the 
same year, is among the most surprising in literature. 1 
From the most elevated of tragedies we pass to a 
comedy, which, while not belonging to the great comedy 
of character, is charmingly gay. We expect no grave 
moralities here, nor do we find them. The play is a 
free and original adaptation from a work of the Spanish 
dramatist Alarcon, but in Corneille's hands it becomes 
characteristically French. Young Dorante, the liar, 
invents his fictions through an irresistible genius for 
romancing. His indignant father may justly ask, Has 
he a heart ? Is he a gentleman ? But how can a youth 
with such a pretty wit resist the fascination of his own 
lies ? He is sufficiently punished by the fact that they 
do not assist, but rather trouble, the course of his love 
adventure, and we demand no further poetical justice. 
In Corneille's art, tragedy had defined itself, and comedy 
was free to be purely comic ; but it is also literary — 
light, yet solid in structure ; easy, yet exact in style. 
The Suite du Menteur, founded on a comedy by Lope 
de Vega, has a curious attraction of its own, half-fantastic 
as it is, and half-realistic ; yet it has shared the fate of 
all continuations, and could not attain the popularity 
of its predecessor. It lacks gaiety ; the liar has sunk 
into a rascal, and we can hardly lend credence to the 
amendment in his mendacious habit when he applies 
the art of dissimulation to generous purposes. 

These are the masterpieces of Corneille. Already in 

1 Polyeucte may possibly be as early as 1 64 1. 



168 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Pompe'e, although its date is that of Polyeucte, while the 
great dramatist is present throughout, he is not always 
present at his best. It should not surprise us that 
Corneille preferred Lucan to Virgil. Something of the 
over-emphasis of the Pharsalia, his original, has entered 
into the play; but the pomp of the verse is no vulgar 
pomp. A graver fault is the want of a dramatic centre 
for the action, which tends too much towards the epic. 
Pompey is the presiding power of the tragedy; his spirit 
dominates the lesser characters ; but he does not appear 
in person. The political interest develops somewhat to 
the subordination of the personal interest. Corneille's 
unhappy theory of later years, that love is unworthy of 
a place in high tragedy, save as an episode, is here 
exemplified in the passion of Caesar for Cleopatra ; but, 
in truth, love is too sovereign a power to admit of its 
being tagged to tragedy as an ornament. 

Until 1636 Corneille was seeking his way. From 1636 
to 1644 his genius soared on steady pinions. During 
the eight years that followed he triumphed, but he also 
faltered. Rodogune (1644), which he preferred to all his 
other plays, is certainly, by virtue of the enormity of the 
characters, the violence of the passions, the vastness of 
its crimes, the most romantic of his tragedies ; it is con- 
structed with the most skilful industry ; from scene to 
scene the emotion is intensified and heightened until 
the great fifth act is reached ; but if by incompar- 
able, audacity the dramatist attains the ideal, it is an 
ideal of horror. Theodore, a second play of martyr- 
dom, fell far below Polyeucte. Hei-aclius is obscure 
through the complication of its intrigue. Don Sanche 
d'Aragon, d. romantic tragi-comedy, is less admirable as 
a whole than in the more brilliant scenes. In the his- 






CORNEILLE'S DECLINE 169 

torical drama Nicomede (165 1), side by side with tragic 
solemnities appears matter of a familiar kind. It was 
the last great effort of its author's genius. The failure 
of Pertharite, in 1652, led to the withdrawal of Corneille 
from the theatre during seven years. He completed 
during his seclusion a rendering into verse of the 
Imitation of Jesus Christ. When he returned to the 
stage it was with enfeebled powers, which were over- 
strained by the effort of his will ; yet he could still write 
noble lines, and in the tragedy-ballet of Psyche, in which 
Quinault and Moliere were his collaborators, the most 
charming verses are those of Corneille. His young 
rival Racine spoke to the hearts of a generation less 
heroic and swayed by tenderer passion, and the old 
man resented the change. Domestic sorrows were 
added to the grief of ill success in his art. Living 
simply, his means were narrow for his needs. The last 
ten years of his life were years of silence. He died in 
1684, at the age of seventy-eight. 

The drama of Corneille deals with what is extraordi- 
nary, but in what is extraordinary it seeks for truth. 
He finds the marvellous in the triumphs of the human 
will. His great inventive powers were applied to creat- 
ing situations for the manifestation of heroic energy. 
History attracted him, because a basis of fact seemed 
to justify what otherwise could not be accepted as pro- 
bable. Great personages suited his purpose, because they 
can deploy their powers on the amplest scale. His char- 
acters, men and women, act not through blind, instinc- 
tive passion, but with deliberate and intelligent force ; 
they reason, and too often with casuistical subtlety, 
about their emotions. At length he came to glorify 
the will apart from its aims and ends, when tending 



I ;o FRENCH LITERATURE 

even to crime, or acting, as it were, in the void. He 
thought much of the principles of his art, and embodied 
his conclusions in critical dissertations and studies of his 
own works. He accepted the rule of the Unities of place 
and time (of which at first he was ignorant) as far as his 
themes permitted, as far as the rules served to concen- 
trate action and secure verisimilitude. His mastery in 
verse of a masculine eloquence is unsurpassed ; his 
dialogue of rapid statement and swift reply is like a 
combat with Roman short swords ; in memorable single 
lines he explodes, as it were, a vast charge of latent 
energy, and effects a clearance for the progress of his 
action. His faults, like his virtues, are great ; and 
though faults and virtues may be travestied, both are 
in reality alike inimitable. 

Alone among Corneille's dramatic rivals, if they de- 
serve that name — Du Ryer, Tristan, Scudery, Boisrobert, 
and others — JEAN ROTROU (1609-50) had the magna- 
nimity to render homage to the master of his art. 
While still a boy he read Sophocles, and resolved that 
he would live for the dramatic art. His facility was 
great, and he had the faults of a facile writer, who started 
on his career at the age of nineteen. He could not 
easily submit to the regulation of the classical drama, and 
squandered his talents in extravagant tragi-comedies ; 
but his work grew sounder and stronger towards the 
close. Saint Genest (1646), which is derived, but in no 
servile fashion, from Lope de Vega, recalls Polyeucte ; 
an actor of the time of Diocletian, in performing the 
part of a Christian martyr, is penetrated by the heroic 
passion which he represents, confesses his faith, and 
receives its crown in martyrdom. The tragi -comedy 
Don Bernard de Cabrere and the tragedy Venceslas of 



ROTROU : THOMAS CORNEILLE 171 

the following year exhibit the romantic and passionate 
sides of Rotrou's genius. The intemperate yet noble 
Ladislas has rashly and in error slain his brother ; he 
is condemned to death by his father Venceslas, King 
of Poland, and he accepts his doom. The situation is 
such as Corneille might have imagined ; but Rotrou's 
young hero in the end is pardoned and receives the 
kingdom. If their careless construction and unequal 
style in general forbade the dramas of Rotrou to hold 
the stage, they remained as a store from which greater 
artists than he could draw their material. His death 
was noble : the plague having broken out at Dreux, he 
hastened from Paris to the stricken town, disregarding 
all affectionate warnings, there to perform his duty as a 
magistrate ; within a few days the inhabitants followed 
Rotrou's coffin to the parish church. 

Thomas Corneille, the faithful and tender brother 
of "■ le grand Corneille," and his successor in the 
Academy, belongs to a younger generation. He was 
born in 1625, and did not die until near the close 
of the first decade of the eighteenth century. As 
an industrious playwright he imitated his brother's 
manner, and reproduced his situations with a feebler 
hand. Many of his dramas are of Spanish origin, 
comic imbroglios, tragic extravagances ; they rather 
diverted dramatic art from its true way than aided its 
advance. Perhaps for this reason they were the more 
popular. His Timocrate (1656), drawn from the romance 
of Cleopatre, and itself a romance written for the stage, 
had a success rarely equalled during the century. The 
hero is at once the enemy and the lover of the Queen 
of Argos ; under one name he besieges her, under 
another he repels his own attack ; he is hated and 



172 FRENCH LITERATURE 

adored, the conquered and the conqueror. The lan- 
guors of conventional love and the plaintive accents 
of conventional grief suited the powers of the younger 
Corneille. His Ariane (1672) presents a heroine, 
Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus, who reminds us of 
one of Racine's women, drawn with less certain lines 
and fainter colours. In Le Comte cC Essex history is 
transformed to a romance. Perhaps the greatest glory 
of Thomas Corneille is that his reception as an Acade- 
mician became the occasion for a just and eloquent 
tribute to the genius of his brother uttered by Racine, 
when the bitterness of rivalry was forgotten and the 
offences of Racine's earlier years were nobly repaired. 



CHAPTER IV 

SOCIETY AND PUBLIC LIFE IN LETTERS 

Before noticing the theories of classical poetry in the 
writings of its master critic, Boileau, we must glance at 
certain writers who belonged rather to the world of 
public life and of society than to the world of art, but 
who became each a master in literary craft, as it were, 
by an irresistible instinct. Memoirs, maxims, epistolary 
correspondence, the novel, in their hands took a dis- 
tinguished place in the hierarchy of literary art. 

Francois VI., Due de la Rochefoucauld, Prince 
de Marsillac, was born in 1613, of one of the greatest 
families of France. His life is divided into two periods 
— one of passionate activity, when with romantic 
ardour he threw himself into the struggles of the 
Fronde, only to be foiled and disillusioned ; and the 
other of bitter reflection, consoled by certain social 
successes, loyal friendships, and an unique literary 
distinction. His Maximes are the brief confession of 
his experience of life, an utterance of the pessimism 
of an aristocratic spirit, moulded into a form proper 
to the little world of the salon — each maxim a drop 
of the attar not of roses but of some more poignant and 
bitterly aromatic blossom. In the circle of Mme. de 
Sable, now an elderly precieuse, a circle half-Epicurean, 
half-Jansenist, frivolously serious and morosely gay, the 



174 FRENCH LITERATURE 

composition of maxims and "sentences" became a 
fashion. Those of La Rochefoucauld were submitted 
to her as to an oracle ; five years were given to shaping 
a tiny volume ; fifteen years to rehandling and polishing 
every phrase. They are like a collection of medals struck 
in honour of the conquests of cynicism. The first sur- 
reptitious edition, printed in Holland in 1664, was 
followed by an authorised edition in 1665 ; the number 
of maxims, at first 317, rose finally in 1678 to 504; some 
were omitted ; many were reduced to the extreme of 
concision ; under the influence of Mine, de la Fayette, 
in the later texts the indictment of humanity was slightly 
attenuated. " II m'a donne de l'esprit," said Mme. de la 
Fayette, "mais j'ai reforme son coeur." 

The motto of the book, "Our virtues are commonly 
vices in disguise," expresses its central idea. La Roche- 
foucauld does not absolutely deny disinterested good- 
ness ; there may be some such instinctive virtue lying 
below all passions which submit to be analysed ; he does 
not consider the love of God, the parental or the filial 
affections ; but wherever he applies analysis, it is to 
reduce each apparently disinterested feeling to self-love. 
"We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes 
of another ; " "When vices desert us, we flatter ourselves 
with the belief that it is we who desert them;" "With 
true love it is as with apparitions — every one talks of 
them, but few persons have seen them ; " " Virtues lose 
themselves in self-interest as rivers lose themselves in 
the sea ; " " In the adversity of our best friends we always 
find something which does not displease us" — such are 
the moral comments on life graven in ineffaceable lines 
by La Rochefoucauld. He is not a philosophic thinker, 
but he is a penetrating and remorseless critic, who re- 



LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 175 

mains at one fixed point of view; self-interest is assuredly 
a large factor in human conduct, and he exposes much 
that is real in the heart of man ; much also that is not 
universally true was true of the world in which he had 
moved ; whether we accept or reject his doctrine, we are 
instructed by a statement so implacable and so precise 
of the case against human nature as he saw it. Pitiless 
he was not himself ; perhaps his artistic instinct led him 
to exclude concessions which would have marred the 
unity of his conception ; possibly his vanity co-operated 
in producing phrases which live and circulate by virtue 
of the shock they communicate to our self-esteem. The 
merit of his Maximes as examples of style — a style which 
may be described as lapidary — is incomparable; it is 
impossible to say more, or to say it more adequately, 
in little ; but one wearies in the end of the monotony of 
an idea unalterably applied, of unqualified brilliance, of 
unrelieved concision ; we anticipate our surprise, and 
its purpose is defeated. Traces of preciosity are found 
in some of the earliest sentences ; that infirmity was 
soon overcome by La Rochefoucauld, and his utterances 
become as clear and as hard as diamond. 

He died at the age of sixty-seven, in the arms of 
Bossuet. His Memoires, 1 relating to the period of 
the Fronde, are written with an air of studied histori- 
cal coldness, which presents a striking contrast to the 
brilliant vivacity of Retz. 

The most interesting figure of the Fronde, its portrait- 
painter, its analyst, its historian, is Cardinal de Retz 
(1614-1679). Italian by his family, and Italian in some 
features of his character, he had, on a scale of grandeur, 
the very genius of conspiracy. When his first work ; 

1 Ed. 1662, surreptitious and incomplete ; best ed. 1817. 



176 FRENCH LITERATURE 

La Conjuration de Fiesque, was read by Richelieu, the 
judgment which that great statesman pronounced was 
penetrating — f! Voila un dangereux esprit." Low of 
stature, ugly, ill-made, short-sighted, Retz played the 
part of a gallant and a duellist. Never had any one 
less vocation for the spiritual duties of an ecclesiastic ; 
but, being a churchman, he would be an illustrious 
actor on the ecclesiastical stage. There was something 
demoniac in his audacity, and with the spirit of tur- 
bulence and intrigue was united a certain power of 
self-restraint. When fallen, he still tried to be mag- 
nificent, though in disgrace : he would resign his arch- 
bishopric, pay his enormous debts, resign his cardinalate, 
exhibit himself as the hero in misfortune. "Having lived 
as a Catiline," said Voltaire, "he lived as an Atticus." 
In retirement, as his adventurous life drew towards its 
close, he wrote, at the request of Madame de Caumartin, 
those Memoirs which remained unpublished until 1717, 
and which have insured him a place in literature only 
second to Saint-Simon. 

It was an age remarkable for its memoirs ; those 
of Mdlle. de Montpensier, of Mme. de Motteville, of 
Bussy-Rabutin are only a few of many. The .Memoires 
of Retz far surpass the rest not only in their historical 
interest, but in their literary excellence. Arranging 
facts and dates so that he might superbly figure in the 
drama designed for future generations, he falsifies the 
literal truth of things ; but he lays bare the inner truth 
of politics, of life, of character, with incomparable mas- 
tery. He exposes the disorder of his conduct in early 
years with little scruple. The origins of the Fronde 
are expounded in pages of profound sagacity. His 
narrative has all the impetuosity, all the warmth and 



RETZ: MME. DE SEVIGNE 177 

hues of life, all the tumult and rumour of action ; he 
paints, but in painting he explains ; he touches the 
hidden springs of passion ; his portraits of contem- 
poraries are not more vivid in their colours than they 
are searching in their psychology : and in his style 
there is that negligent grandeur which belongs rather 
to the days of Louis XIII. than to the age of his 
successor, when language grew more exact for the 
intelligence, but lost much of its passion and untamed 
energy. 

The epistolary art, in which the art itself is nature, 
may be said to have reached perfection, with scarcely 
an historical development, in the letters of Mme. de 
Sevigne. The letters of Balzac are rhetorical exer- 
cises ; those of Voiture are often, to use a word of 
Shakespeare, "heavy lightness, serious vanity." Mme. 
de Sevigne entered into the gains of a cultivated society, 
in which graceful converse had become a necessity of 
existence. She wrote delightfully, because she con- 
veyed herself into her letters, and because she con- 
versed freely and naturally by means of her pen. Marie 
de Rabutin - Chantal, born in 1626, deprived of both 
parents in her earliest years, was carefully trained in 
literary studies — Latin, Italian, French — under the 
superintendence of her uncle, 'Me bien bon," the Abbe 
de Coulanges. Among her teachers were the scholar 
Menage and the poet Chapelain. Married at eighteen 
to an unworthy husband, the Marquis Henri de Sevigne, 
she was left at twenty-five a widow with two children, 
the daughter whom she loved with excess of devotion, 
and a son, who received from his mother a calmer 
affection. She saw the life of the court, she was 
acquainted with eminent writers, she frequented the 



1 78 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Hotel de Rambouillet (retaining from it a touch of 
preciosity, "one superfluous ribbon," says Nisard, "in 
a simple and elegant toilet"), she knew and loved the 
country and its rural joys, she read with excellent 
judgment and eager delight the great books of past 
and present times. 

When her daughter, "the prettiest girl in France," was 
married in 1669 to M. de Grignan, soon to be Lieutenant- 
General of Provence, Mme. de Sevigne, desiring to be 
constantly one with her, at least in thought, transferred 
into letters her whole life from day to day, together 
with much of the social life of the time during a 
period of nearly thirty years. She allowed her pen 
to trot, throwing the reins, as she says, upon its neck ; 
but if her letters are improvisations, they are impro- 
visations regulated by an exquisite artistic instinct. Her 
imagination is alert in discovering, combining, and pre- 
senting the happiest meanings of reality. She is gay, 
witty, ironical, malicious, and all this without a trace 
of malignity ; amiable rather than passionate, except 
in the ardour of her maternal devotion, which some- 
times proved oppressive to a daughter who, though 
not unloving, loved with a temperate heart ; faithful to 
friends, loyal to those who had fallen into misfortune, 
but neither sentimental nor romantic, nor disposed to 
the generosities of a universal humanity ; a woman of 
spirit, energy, and good sense ; capable of serious re- 
flection, though not of profound thought ; endowed 
with an exquisite sense of the power of words, and, 
indeed, the creator of a literary style. While her interests 
were in the main of a mundane kind, she was in sympathy 
with Port-Royal ; admired the writings of Pascal, and 
deeply reverenced Nicole. Domestic affairs, business 



MME. DE MAINTENON 179 

(concern for her children having involved her in finan- 
cial troubles), the aristocratic life of Paris and Versailles, 
literature, the pleasures and tedium of the country, the 
dulness or gaiety of a health-resort, the rise and fall 
of those in power, the petty intrigues and spites and 
follies of the day — these, and much besides, enter into 
Mme. de Sevigne's records, records made upon the 
moment, with all the animation of an immediate im- 
pression, but remaining with us as one of the chief 
documents for the social history of the second half of 
the seventeenth century. In April 1696 Mme. de 
Sevigne" died. 

Beside the letters addressed to her daughter are 
others — far fewer in number — to her cousin Bussy- 
Rabutin, to her cousin Mme. de Coulanges, to Pom- 
ponne, and other correspondents. In Bussy's Memoires 
et Correspondence (1696-97) first appeared certain of her 
letters ; a collection, very defective and inaccurate, was 
published in 1726; eight years later the first portion of 
an authorised text was issued under the sanction of the 
writer's grand-daughter ; gradually the material was re- 
covered, until it became of vast extent ; even since 
the appearance of the edition among the Grands E.cri- 
vains de la France two volumes of Lettres inedites have 
been published. 

Among the other letter-writers of the period, perhaps 
the most distinguished were Mme. de Sevigne's old and 
attached friend Mme. de la Fayette, and the woman of 
supreme authority with the King, Mme. de Maintenon. 
A just view of Mme. de Maintenon's character has 
been long obscured by the letters forged under her 
name by La Beaumelle, and by the bitter hostility 
of Saint-Simon. On a basis of ardour and sensibility 



180 FRENCH LITERATURE 

she built up a character of unalterable reason and good 
sense. -Her letters are not creations of genius, unless 
practical wisdom and integrity of purpose be forms 
of genius. She does not gossip delightfully ; at times 
she may seem a little hard or dry ; but her reason is 
really guided by human kindness. "■ Her style," wrote 
a high authority, Dollinger, " is clear, terse, refined, 
often sententious ; her business letters are patterns of 
simplicity and pregnant brevity. They might be char- 
acterised as womanly yet manly, so well do they com- 
bine the warmth and depth of womanly feeling with 
the strength and lucidity of a masculine mind." The 
foundation of Saint-Cyr, for the education of girls well- 
born but poor, was the object of her constant solici- 
tude ; there she put out her talents as a teacher and 
guide of youth to the best interest ; there she found 
play for her best affections : " C'est le lieu," she said, 
" de delices pour moi." 

The friend of Madame de Sevigne, the truest woman 
whom La Rochefoucauld had ever known, Madame de 
la Fayette was the author of two historical works, 
of which one is exquisite — a memorial of her friend 
the Duchess of Orleans, and of two — perhaps three — 
romances, the latest of which, in the order of chronology, 
is the masterpiece of seventeenth-century fiction. Marie 
de la Vergne, born in 1634, a pupil of Menage, married 
at twenty-one to M. de la Fayette, became the trusted 
companion of the bright and gracious Henrietta of 
England. It is not that part of Madame's life, when 
she acted as intermediary between Louis XIV. and her 
brother, Charles II., that is recorded by her friend : it 
is the history of her heart. Nothing is more touching 
in its simplicity than the narrative of Madame's last 



MME. DE LA FAYETTE 181 

moments ; it serves as the best possible comment on 
the pathetic Funeral Oration of Bossuet. We have no 
grounds for asserting that the married life of Madame de 
la Fayette was unhappy, except through the inadequacy 
of a husband whose best qualities seem to have been of 
a negative kind. During the fifteen years which preceded 
the death of La Rochefoucauld her friendship for him 
was the centre of her existence. She seemed to bear 
about with her some secret grief ; something remained 
veiled from other friends than he, and they named 
her le Brouillard. She outlived her friend by thirteen 
years, and during ten was widowed. In 1693 she died. 

Her earliest novel, La Princesse de Montpensier (1662), 
a tale of the days of the Valois and of St. Bartholomew, 
is remarkable for its truthful pictures of the manners 
of the court, its rendering of natural and unexaggerated 
feeling, and for the fact that it treats of married life, 
occupying itself with such themes as have been dealt with 
in many of its modern successors. The Zayde, of eight 
years later, was written in collaboration with Segrais. 
It is in La Princesse de Cleves (1678) that the genius and 
the heart of Madame de la Fayette find a perfect expres- 
sion. The Princess, married to a husband who loves 
her devotedly, and whom she honours, but whose feel- 
ings she cannot return, is tempted by the brilliant Due 
de Nemours and by the weakness of her own passion, 
to infidelity. She resolves to confide her struggle to her 
husband, and seek in him a protector against herself. 
The hard confession is made, but a grievous and in- 
evitable change has passed over their lives. Believing 
himself deceived, M. de Cleves is seized by a fever 
and dies, not without the consolation of learning his 
error. Nemours renews his vows and entreaties; the 



1 82 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Princess refuses his hand, and atones for her error 
in cloistered seclusion. The tale has lost none of its 
beauty and pathos after a lapse of two centuries. Does 
it reveal the hidden grief of the writer's life ? And was 
her friend, the Due de la Rochefoucauld, delivered from 
his gout and more than a score of years, transformed 
by Madame de la Fayette into the foiled lover of her 
tale? 



CHAPTER V 

BOILEAU AND LA FONTAINE 

The great name in criticism of the second half of the 
seventeenth century is that of Boileau. But one of 
whom Boileau spoke harshly, a soldier, a man of the 
world, the friend of Ninon de l'Enclos, a sceptical Epicu- 
rean, an amateur in letters, Saint-Evremond (1613-1703), 
among his various writings, aided the cause of criticism 
by the intuition which he had of what is excellent, 
by a fineness of judgment as far removed from mere 
licence as from the pedantry of rules. Fallen into 
disfavour with the King, Saint-Evremond was received 
into .the literary society of London. His criticism is 
that of a fastidious taste, of balance and moderation, 
guided by tradition, yet open to new views if they 
approved themselves to his culture and good sense. 
Had his studies been more serious, had his feelings 
been more generous and ardent, had his moral sense 
been less shallow, he might have made important con- 
tributions to literature. As it was, to be a man of the 
world was his trade, to be a writer was only an admir- 
able foible. 

Nicolas Boileau, named DesprEaux, from a field 
{pre) of his father's property at Crosne, was born in Paris, 
1636, son of the registrar of the Grand'Chambre du 

Palais. His choice of a profession lay between the 

183 



1 84 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Church and that with which his father was connected 
— the law ; but though he made some study of theology, 
and was called to the bar, his inclination for literature 
could not be resisted. His whole life, indeed, was that 
of a man of letters — upright, honourable, serious, digni- 
fied, simple ; generous to the friends whose genius he 
could justly applaud ; merciless to books and authors 
condemned by his reason, his good sense, his excellent 
judgment. He was allied by an ardent admiration to 
Racine, and less intimately to Moliere, La Fontaine, and 
Chapelle ; Jansenist through his religious sympathies, 
and closely attached to the venerable Arnauld; appointed 
historiographer to the King (1677) together with Racine; 
an Academician by the King's desire, notwithstanding 
the opposition of his literary enemies. In his elder 
years his great position of authority in the world of 
letters was assured, but he suffered from infirmities of 
body, and from an increasing severity of temper. In 
171 1 he died, bequeathing a large sum of money to the 
poor. 

Boileau's literary career falls into three periods — the 
first, militant and destructive, in which he waged suc- 
cessful war against all that seemed to him false and 
despicable in art ; the second, reconstructive, in which 
he declared the doctrine of what may be termed literary 
rationalism, and legislated for the French Parnassus ; 
the third, dating from his appointment as historiogra- 
pher, a period of comparative repose and, to some 
extent, of decline, but one in which the principles of 
his literary faith were maintained and pressed to new 
conclusions. His writings include twelve satires (of 
which the ninth, "A son Esprit," is the chief master- 
piece) ; twelve epistles (that to Racine being pre- 



BOILEAU AS POET 185 

eminent); the literary-didactic poem, L Art Poetique; 
a heroi-comical epic, Le Lutrin ; miscellaneous shorter 
poems (among which may be noted the admirable 
epitaph on Arnauld, and an unhappy ode, Sur la Prise 
de Namur, 1693) ; and various critical studies in prose, 
his Lucianic dialogue Lcs Heros de Roman, satirising 
the extravagant novels not yet dismissed to oblivion, 
and his somewhat truculent Reflexions sur Longin being 
specially deserving of attention. The satires preceded 
in date the epistles ; of the former, the first nine belong 
to the years 1660-67 > the tirst nme °t the epistles to 
the years 1669-77 > three satires and three epistles may 
be described as belated. The year 1674 is memorable 
as that in which were published L Art Poetique and 
the first four cliants of Le Lutrin. 

The genius of Boileau was in a high degree intel- 
lectual, animated by ideas ; but it is an error to suppose 
that a sensuous element is absent from his verse. It 
is verse of the classical school, firm and clear, but it 
addresses the ear with a studied harmony, and what 
Boileau saw he could render into exact, definite, and 
vivid expression. His imagination was not in a large 
sense creative ; he was wholly lacking in tenderness and 
sensibility ; his feeling for external nature was no more 
than that of a Parisian bourgeois who enjoys for a day 
the repose of the fields ; but for Paris itself, its various 
aspects, its life, its types, its manners, he had the eye 
and the precise rendering of a realist in art ; his faithful 
objective touch is like that of a Dutch painter. As a 
moralist, he is not searching or profound ; he saw too 
little of the inner world of the heart, and knew too im- 
perfectly its agitations. When, however, he deals with 
literature — and a just judgment in letters may almost be 



1 86 FRENCH LITERATURE 

called an element in morals — all his penetration and 
power become apparent. 

To clear the ground for the new school of nature, 
truth and reason was Boileau's first task. It was a 
task which called for courage and skill. The public 
taste was still uncertain. Laboured and lifeless epics 
like Chapelain's La Pucelle, petty ingenuities in metre 
like those of Cotin, violence and over-emphasis, ex- 
travagances of sentiment, faded preciosities, inane 
pastoralisms, gross or vulgar burlesques, tragedies 
languorous and insipid, lyrics of pretended passion, 
affectations from the degenerate Italian literature, super- 
subtleties from Spain — these had still their votaries. 
And the conduct of life and characters of men of 
letters were often unworthy of the vocation they pro- 
fessed. " La haine d'un sot livre " Was an inspiration for 
Boileau, as it afterwards was for our English satirist 
Pope ; and he felt deeply that dignity of art is connected 
with dignity of character and rectitude of life — " Le vers 
se sent toujours des bassesses de cceur." He struck at the 
follies and affectations of the world of letters, and he 
struck with force : it was a needful duty, and one most 
effectively performed. Certain of the Epistles, which 
are written with less pitiless severity and with a more 
accomplished mastery of verse, continue the work of the 
Satires. From Horace he derived much, something 
from Juvenal, and something from his predecessor Reg- 
nier ; but he had not the lightness nor the bonhomie of 
Horace, nor his easy and amiable wisdom. 

In the Art Poetique Boileau is constructive ; he exhibits 
the true doctrine of literature, as he conceived it. Granted 
genius, fire, imagination — the gifts of heaven — what should 
be the self-imposed discipline of a poet ? Above all, 



BOILEAU AS CRITIC 187 

the cultivation of that power which distinguishes false 
from true, and aids every other faculty — the reason. 
" Nothing," declares Boileau, " is beautiful save what is 
true ; " nature is the model, the aim and end of art ; 
reason and good sense discern reality ; they test the 
fidelity of the artistic imitation of nature ; they alone 
can vouch for the correspondence of the idea with 
its object, and the adequacy of the expression to the 
idea. What is permanent and universal in litera- 
ture lives by the aid of no fashion of the day, but by 
virtue of its truth to nature. And hence is derived 
the authority of the ancient classics, which have been 
tried by time and have endured ; these we do not 
accept as tyrants, but we may safely follow as guides. 
To study nature is, however, before all else to study 
man — that is, human nature — and to distinguish in 
human nature what is universal and abiding from what 
is transitory and accidental ; we cannot be expected to 
discover things absolutely new ; it suffices to give to 
what is true a perfect expression. Unhappily, human 
nature, as understood by Boileau, included little beyond 
the court and the town. Unhappily his appreciation of 
classical literature was defective ; to justify as true and 
natural the mythology of Greece he has to regard it as 
a body of symbols or a moral allegory. Unhappily his 
survey of literature was too narrow to include the truths 
and the splendours of Mediaeval poetry and art. For 
historical truth, indeed, he had little sense ; seeking for 
what is permanent and universal, he had little regard 
for local colour and the truth of manners. To secure 
assent from contemporary minds truth must assume 
what they take to be its image, and a Greek or Roman 
on the stage must not shock the demand for verisimili- 



1 88 FRENCH LITERATURE 

tude made by the courtly imagination of the days of 
Louis Quatorze. Art which fails to please is no longer 
art. 

To the workmanship, the technique of poetry, Boileau 
attaches a high importance. Its several species — idyl, 
elegy, ode, sonnet, epigram, rondeau, ballade, madrigal, 
satire, epic, tragedy, comedy — are separated from one 
another by fixed boundaries, and each is subject to its 
own rules ; but genius, on occasion, may transcend those 
rules, and snatch an unauthorised grace. It is difficult 
to understand why from among the genres of poetry 
Boileau omitted the fable ; perhaps he did not regard 
its form, now in verse and now in prose, as defined ; 
possibly he was insensible of the perfection to which 
the fable in verse had been carried by La Fontaine. 
The fourth chant of the -Art Poetique is remarkable for 
its lofty conception of the position of the poet ; its 
counsels express the dignity of the writer's own literary 
life. He has been charged not only with cruelty as a 
satirist, but with the baseness of a flatterer of the great. 
It would be more just to notice the honourable in- 
dependence which he maintained, notwithstanding his 
poetical homage to the King, which was an inevitable 
requisition. Boileau's influence as a critic of literature 
can hardly be overrated ; it has much in common with 
the influence of Pope on English literature — beneficial 
as regards his own time, somewhat restrictive and even 
tyrannical upon later generations. 

Le Lutrin (completed in 1683) is not a burlesque 
which degrades a noble theme, but, like Pope's far 
more admirable Rape of the Lock, a heroi-comic poem 
humorously exalting humble matter of the day. It tells 
of the combats of ecclesiastics respecting the position 



LA FONTAINE 189 

of a lectern, combats in which the books of a neigh- 
bouring publisher serve as formidable projectiles. The 
scene is in the Sainte-Chapelle and the Palais de Justice. 
Boileau's gift for the vivid presentation of visible detail, 
and his skill in versification, served him here better than 
did his choice of a subject. On the whole, we think of 
him less as a poet than as the classical guardian and 
legislator of poetry. He was an emancipator by direct- 
ing art towards reason and truth ; when larger inter- 
pretations of truth and reason than his became possible, 
his influence acted unfavourably as a constraint. 

All that Boileau lacked as a poet was possessed by 
the most easy and natural of the singers of his time — 
one whose art is like nature in its freedom, while yet 
it never wrongs the delicate bounds of art. Jean de 
la Fontaine was born in 1621 at Chateau-Thierry, in 
Champagne, son of the " maitre des eaux et forets." 
His education was less of a scholastic kind than an 
education derived from books read for his own plea- 
sure, and especially from observation or reverie among 
the woods and fields, with their population of bird, beast, 
and insect, so dear to his heart and his imagination. Slip- 
ping away from theology and law, he passed ten years, 
from twenty-three to thirty-three, in seeming indolence, a 
" bon garcon," irreclaimably wayward as regards worldly 
affairs, but already drawing in to himself all that fed his 
genius, all sights and sounds of nature, all the lore of 
old poets, story-tellers, translators, and already practising 
his art of verse. Nothing that was not natural to him, 
and wholly to his liking, would he or could he do ; but 
happily he was born to write perfect verses, and the 
labour of the artist was with him an instinct and a 
delight. He allowed himself to be married to a pretty 



i 9 o FRENCH LITERATURE 

girl of fifteen, and presently forgot that he had a wife 
and child, drifted away, and agreed in 1659 to a divi- 
sion of goods ; but his carelessness and egoism were 
without a touch of malignity, those of an overgrown child 
rather than of a man. 

In 1654 he published a translation of the Eunuch of 
Terence of small worth, and not long after was favoured 
with the patronage of Fouquet, the superintendant of 
finance. To him La Fontaine presented his Adonis, a 
narrative poem, graceful, picturesque, harmonious, ex- 
pressing a delicate feeling for external nature rarely to 
be found in poetry of the time, and reviving some of 
the bright Renaissance sense of antiquity. The genius 
of France is united in La Fontaine's writings with the 
genius of Greece. But the verses written by command 
for Fouquet are laboured and ineffective. His ill-con- 
structed and unfinished Songe de Vaux, partly in prose, 
partly in verse, was designed to celebrate his patron's 
Chateau de Vaux. 

Far happier than this is the poem in dialogue Clymene, 
a dramatic fantasy, in which Apollo on Mount Parnassus 
learns by the aid of the Muses the loves of Acante (La 
Fontaine) and Clymene (Madame X . . .), a rural beauty, 
whom the god had seen wandering on the banks of 
Hippocrene. On the fall of his magnificent patron La 
Fontaine did not desert him, pleading in his &legie aux 
Nymphes de Vaux on behalf of the disgraced minister. As 
a consequence, the poet retired for a time from Paris to 
banishment at Limoges. But in 1664 he is again in 
Paris or at Chateau-Thierry, his native place, where the 
Duchesse de Bouillon, niece of Mazarin, young, gay, plea- 
sure-loving, bestowed on him a kind protection. His 
tedious paraphrase of Psyche, and the poem Quinquina, 



LA FONTAINE'S CONTES 191 

in which he celebrates the recovery from illness of the 
Duchess, were performances of duty and gratitude rather 
than of native impulse ; but the tendencies of her salon, 
restrained neither by the proprieties of the classical doc- 
trine in literature nor those of religious strictness, may 
have encouraged him to the production of his Contes. 

In Paris, from 1661 to 1664 joyous meetings took place 
in Boileau's rooms in the Rue du Colombier of a distin- 
guished group, which included Moliere, Chapelle, Racine, 
and La Fontaine. La Fontaine, the bonhomme,who escaped 
from the toil of conversation which did not interest 
him in shy or indolent taciturnity, could be a charm- 
ing talker with companions of his choice. Probably to 
Boileau's urgency is due the first original publication 
of La Fontaine, a little volume of Nouvelles en Vers (1664- 
1665), containing the Joconde, a tale from Ariosto, and a 
comic story versified from Boccaccio. Almost imme- 
diately there followed a collection of ten Contes, with the 
author's name upon the title-page, and at various later 
dates were published added tales, until five parts com- 
pleted the series.' The success was great, but great also 
was the scandal, for the bonhomme, drawing from Boc- 
caccio, the Heptameron, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, 
Rabelais, Petronius, Athenaeus, and other sources, had 
exhibited no more regard for decency than that which 
bestows the graces of lightness, brightness, wit, and 
gaiety upon indecency. His unabashed apology was 
that the artistic laws of the conte obliged him to decline 
the laws of modesty ; and among those who applauded 
his tales were the Duchess de Bouillon and Mme. de 
Sevigne. It is indeed impossible not to applaud their 
skill in rapid and easy narrative, and the grace, freedom, 
and spontaneity of the verse. 



192 FRENCH LITERATURE 

The first six books of the Fables appeared in 1668 ; the 
next five in two parts, in 1678 and 1679 ; the twelfth and 
last book in 1694. When the Psyche was published, soon 
after the first group of the 'Fables, the prose and verse 
were placed in a graceful setting, which tells of the con- 
verse of the author with his friends Boileau, Racine, and 
Moliere (or possibly Chapelle) in the midst of the un- 
finished gardens of Versailles, where the author of Psyche, 
named happily Polyphile (for he loved many things, and 
among them his friends), will read his romance for his 
literary comrades. 

" fai77ie lejeu, F amour, les livres, la musique, 
La ville et la campagne, enfi.71 tout : il n'est rien 

Qui ne me soit souverain bien 
Jusq^aux sombres plalsirs dhin cosur melancolique? 

Some of his friends before long had passed away, 
but others came to fill their places. For many years 
he was cared for and caressed by the amiable and cul- 
tivated Mme. de Sabliere, and when she dismissed other 
acquaintances she still kept "her dog, her cat, and her 
La Fontaine." The Academy would have opened its 
doors to him sooner than to Boileau, but the King 
would not have it so, and he was admitted (1684) only 
when he had promised Louis XIV. henceforth to be 
sage. When Mme. de Sabliere died, Hervart, maitre des 
requetes, one day offered La Fontaine the hospitality 
of his splendid house. " I was on my way there," re- 
plied the poet. After a season of conversion, in which 
he expressed penitence for his " infamous book" of 
Conies, the bonhomme tranquilly died in April 1693. 
"He is so simple," said his nurse, "that God' will not 
have courage to damn him." "He was the most sincere 
and candid soul," wrote his friend Maucroix, who had 



LA FONTAINE'S FABLES 193 

been intimate with him for more than fifty years, " that 
I have ever known ; never a disguise ; I don't know 
that he spoke an untruth in all his life." 

All that is best in the genius of La Fontaine may be 
found in his Fables. The comedies in which he col- 
laborated, the Captivite de Saint Male, written on the 
suggestion of the Port-Royalists, the miscellaneous 
poems, though some of these are admirable, even the 
Cojites, exhibit only a fragment of his mind ; in the 
Fables the play of his faculties is exquisite, and is com- 
plete. His imagination was unfitted for large and 
sustained creation ; it operated most happily in a nar- 
row compass. The Fables, however, contain much in 
little ; they unite an element of drama and of lyric with 
narrative ; they give scope to his feeling for nature, and 
to his gift for the observation of human character and 
society ; they form, as he himself has said — 

" Une ample comedie a cents actes divers 
Et dont la scene est Funivers? 

He had not to invent his subjects ; he found them in 
all the fabulists who had preceded him — Greek, Latin, 
Oriental, elder French writers — "j'en lis qui sont du 
Nord et qui sont du Midi ; " but he may be said to have 
recreated the species. From an apologue, tending to an 
express moral, he converted the fable into a conte, in 
which narrative, description, observation, satire, dialogue 
have an independent value, and the moral is little more 
than an accident. This is especially true of the midmost 
portion of the collection — Books vii.-ix. — which appeared 
ten years after the earliest group. He does not impose 
new and great ideas on the reader ; he does not interpret 
the deepest passions ; he takes life as he sees it, as an en- 



i 9 4 FRENCH LITERATURE 

tertaining comedy, touched at times with serious thought, 
with pathos, even with melancholy, but in the main a 
comedy, which teaches us to smile at the vanities, the 
follies, the egoisms of mankind, and teaches us at the same 
time something of tenderness and pity for all that is 
gentle or weak. His morality is amiable and somewhat 
epicurean, a morality of indulgence, of moderation, of 
good sense. His eye for what is characteristic and pic- 
turesque in animal life is infallible ; but his humanised 
wild creatures are also a playful, humorous, ironical 
presentation of mankind and of the society of his own 
day, from the grand monarch to the bourgeois or the 
lackey. 

La Fontaine's language escapes from the limitations 
of the classical school of the seventeenth century ; his 
manifold reading in elder French literature enriched 
his vocabulary ; he seems to light by instinct upon the 
most exact and happiest word. Yet we know that the 
perfection of his art was attained only as the result of 
untiring diligence ; indolent and careless as he was in 
worldly affairs, he was an indefatigable craftsman in 
poetry. His verse is as free as it is fine ; it can accom- 
plish whatever it intends ; now it is light and swift, but 
when needful it can be grave and even magnificent : 

" Aurait-il imprime sur le front des etoiles 
Ce que la nuit des temps enfei'me dans ses voiles ? " 

It is verse which depends on no mechanical rules im- 
posed from without ; its life and movement come from 
within, and the lines vary, like a breeze straying among 
blossoms, with every stress or relaxation of the writer's 
mood. While La Fontaine derives much from antiquity, 
he may be regarded as incarnating more than any other 



LA FONTAINE'S ART 195 

writer of his century the genius of France, exquisite in 
the proportion of his feeling and the expression of feeling 
to its source and cause. If we do not name him, with 
some of his admirers, "the French Homer," we may at 
least describe him, with Nisard, as a second Montaigne, 
" mais plus doux, plus aimable, plus naif que le premier," 
and with all the charm of verse superadded. 



CHAPTER VI 

COMEDY AND TRAGEDY— MOLIERE— RACINE 

I 

The history of comedy, from Larivey to Moliere, is one 
of arrested development, followed by hasty and ill- 
regulated growth. During the first twenty-five years 
of the seventeenth century, comedy can hardly be said 
to have existed ; whatever tended to beauty or elevation, 
took the form of tragi-comedy or pastoral ; what was 
rude and popular became a farce. From the farce 
Moliere's early work takes its origin, but of the reper- 
tory of his predecessors little survives. Much, indeed, 
in these performances was left to the improvisation of 
the burlesque actors. Gros-Guillaume, Gaultier-Gar- 
guille, Turlupin, Tabarin, rejoiced the heart of the popu- 
lace ; but the farces tabariniques can hardly be dignified 
with the name of literature. 

In 1632 the comedy of intrigue was advanced by 
Mairet in his Galanteries du Due d'Ossone. The genius 
of Rotrou, follower though he was of Plautus, tended 
towards the tragic ; if he is really gay, it is in La Soeur 
(1645), a bright tangle of extravagant incidents. For 
Rotrou the drama of Italy supplied material ; the way 
to the Spanish drama was opened by d'Ouville, the 

only writer of the time devoted specially to comedy, in 

196 



COMEDY BEFORE MOLIERE 197 

L 'Esprit Fo/iet (1641); once opened, it became a common 
highway. Scarron added to his Spanish originals in 
Jodelet and Do?t Japhet d'Arme'nie his own burlesque 
humour. The comedy of contemporary manners appears 
with grace and charm in Corneille's early plays ; the 
comedy of character, in his admirable Le Menteur. Saint- 
Evremond satirised literary affectations in La Comcdie 
des Academistes ; these and other follies of the time are 
presented with spirit in Desmaret's remarkable comedy, 
Les Visionjiaires. If we add, for sake of its study of 
the peasant in the character of Mathieu Gareau, the 
farcical Pedant Joue of Cyrano, we have named the 
most notable comedies of the years which preceded 
Les Precieuses Ridicules. 

Their general character is extravagance of resources 
in the plot, extravagance of conception in the char- 
acters. Yet in both intrigue and characters there is a 
certain monotony. The same incidents, romantic and 
humorous, are variously mingled to produce the im- 
broglio ; the same typical characters — the braggart, the 
parasite, the pedant, the extravagant poet, the amorous 
old man, the designing woman, the knavish valet, the 
garrulous nurse — play their mirthful parts. If the types 
are studied from real life rather than adopted from 
Italian or Spanish models, they are exaggerated to ab- 
surdity. Corneille alone is distinguished by delicacy 
of imagination and the finer touch of a dexterous 
artist. 

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who, when connected with 
the stage, named himself Moliere, was born in January 
1622, in Paris, the son of a prosperous upholsterer, Jean 
Poquelin, and Marie Cresse, his wife. Educated at the 
College de Clermont, he had among his fellow-pupils the 



i 9 3 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Prince de Conti, Chapelle, the future poet Hesnault, the 
future traveller Bernier. There seems to be no sufficient 
reason to doubt that he and some of his friends after- 
wards received lessons in philosophy from Gassendi, 
whose influence must have tended to loosen him from 
the traditional doctrines, and to encourage independence 
of thought. A translation by Moliere of the great poem 
of Lucretius has been lost, but a possible citation from 
it appears in the second act of the Misanthrope. Legal 
studies followed those of philosophy. But Moliere had 
other ends in view than either those of an advocate 
or of the hereditary office of upholsterer to the King. 
In 1643, at the age of twenty-one, he decided to throw 
in his lot with the theatrical company in which Madeleine 
Bejart and her brothers were leading members. The 
Iilustre Theatre was constituted, but Paris looked askance 
at the illustrious actors; debt, imprisonment, and release 
through friendly aid, formed the net result of Moliere's 
first experiment. 

The troupe decided at the close of 1645 or in the early 
days of the following year to try their fortune in the 
provinces. It is needless to follow in detail their move- 
ments during twelve years — twelve years fruitful in 
experience for one who observed life with keenest eyes, 
years of toil, in which the foundations of his art were 
laid. At Lyons, probably in 1655, possibly in 1653, a 
comedy, founded on the Italian of Nicolo Barbieri, 
UiLtourdi, saw the light, and Moliere revealed himself 
as a poet. Young Lelie, the Etourdi, is enamoured of 
the beautiful Celie, whom the merchant Trufaldin, old 
and rich, has purchased from corsairs. Lelie's valet Mas- 
carille, who is the life of the play, invents stratagem on 
stratagem to aid the lover, and is for ever foiled by his 



LES PRECIEUSES RIDICULES 199 

master's indiscretions, until the inevitable happy denoue- 
ment arrives. The romantic intrigue is conventional ; 
the charm is in the vivacity and colour of the style. 
In 1656 Le De'pit Amoureux was given with applause at 
Beziers ; much is derived from the Italian of Secchi, 
something perhaps from Terence ; the tender scenes 
of lovers' quarrels and lovers' reconciliation, contrasting 
with the franker comedy of the loves of waiting-maid 
and valet, still live, if the rest of the play be little re- 
membered. 

The years of apprenticeship were over when, in 1658, 
Moliere and his company once more in Paris presented, 
by command, before the King, Corneille's Nicomede, and, 
leave being granted, gave his farce in the Italian style, 
the Docteur Amoureux , before pleased spectators. The 
company was now the troupe of Monsieur, the King's 
brother, with the Petit-Bourbon as theatre, and there, 
in November 1659, was enacted Moliere's first satiric play 
on contemporary manners, Les Pre'cieuses Ridicules. We 
do not need the legendary old man crying from the pit 
" Courage, Moliere ! voila la bonne comedie " to assure 
us that the comic stage possessed at length a master- 
piece. The dramatist had himself known the precieuses 
of the provinces ; through them he might with less 
danger exhibit the follies of the Hotel de Rambouillet 
and the ruelles of the capital. The good bourgeois 
Gorgibus is induced by his niece and daughter, two 
precieuses, to establish himself in Paris. Their aspirant 
lovers, unversed in the affectations of the salon, are 
slighted and repelled ; in revenge they employ their 
valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, to play the parts of men 
of fashion and of taste. The exposure and confusion 
of the ladies, with an indignant rebuke from Gorgibus, 



200 FRENCH LITERATURE 

close the piece. It was a farce raised to the dignity of 
comedy. Moliere's triumph was the triumph of good 
sense. 

After a success in Sganarelk (1660), a broad comedy 
of vulgar jealousy, and a decided check — the only one 
in his dramatic career — in the somewhat colourless tragi- 
comedy Don Garde de Navarre (1661), Moliere found a 
theme, suggested by the Adelphi of Terence, which was 
happily suited to his genius. L'Ecole des Maris (1661) 
contrasts two methods of education — one suspicious and 
severe, the other wisely indulgent. Two brothers, Ariste 
and Sg anarelle, seek the hands of their wards, the orphan 
sisters Isabelle and Leonor ; the amiable Ariste, aided 
by the good sense of a gay soubrette, is rewarded with 
happiness ; the vexatious Sganarelle is put to confusion. 
The drama is a plea, expressing the writer's personal 
thoughts, for nature and for freedom. The comedy, of 
manners is here replaced by the comedy of character. 
Its success suggested to Fouquet that Moliere might 
contribute to the amusement of the King at the fetes 
of the Chateau de Yaux ; in fifteen days the dramatist 
had his bright improvisation Les Facheux ready, a series 
of character sketches in scenes rather than a comedy. 
The King smiled approval, and, it was whispered, hinted 
to Moliere that another bore might with advantage be 
added to the collection — the sportsman whose talk shall 
be of sport. At Fontainebleau he duly appeared before 
his Majesty, and unkind spectators recognised a portrait 
of the Marquis de Soyecourt. 

Next February (1662) Moliere, aged forty, was married 
to the actress Armande Bejart, whose age was half his 
own — a disastrous union, which caused him inexpres- 
sible anxiety and unhappiness. In L'Ecole des Femmes 



AFFAIR OF TARTUFE 201 

of the same year he is wiser than he had shown himself 
in actual life. Arnolphe would train a model wife from 
childhood by the method of jealous seclusion and in 
infantile ignorance ; but love, in the person of young 
Horace, finds out a way. There is pathos in the anguish 
of Arnolphe ; yet it is not the order of nature that 
middle-aged folks should practise perverting arts upon 
innocent affections. The charming Agnes belongs of 
right to Horace, and the over-wise, and therefore foolish, 
Arnolphe must quit the scene with his despairing cry. 
Some matter of offence was found by the devout in 
Moliere's play ; it was the opening of a long campaign ; 
the pre'cieuses, the dainty gentle-folk, the critical disciples 
of Aristotle, the rival comedians, were up in arms. 
Moliere for the occasion ignored the devout ; upon the 
others he made brilliant reprisals in La Critique de 
I'Ecole des Femmes (1663) and L 1 Impromptu de Versailles 
(1663). 

Among those who war against nature and human 
happiness, not the least dangerous foe is the religious 
hypocrite. On May 12, 1664, Moliere presented before 
the King the first three acts of his great character- 
comedy Tartufe. Instantly Anne of Austria and the 
King's confessor, now Archbishop of Paris, set to 
work; the public performance of "The Hypocrite" 
was inhibited ; a savage pamphlet was directed against 
its author by the cure of Saint-Barthelemy. Private 
representations, however, were given ; Tartufe, in five 
acts, was played in November in presence of the great 
Conde. In 1665 Moliere's company was named the 
servants of the King ; two years later a verbal permis- 
sion was granted for the public performance of the 
play. It appeared under the title of V Imposteur ; the 



202 FRENCH LITERATURE 

victory seemed won, when again, and without delay, the 
blow fell ; by order of the President, M. de Lamoignon, 
the theatre was closed. Moliere bore up courageously. 
The King was besieging Lille ; Moliere despatched two 
of his comrades to the camp, declaring that if the Tar- 
tufes of France should carry all before them he must 
cease to write. The King was friendly, but the Arch- 
bishop fulminated threats of excommunication against 
any one who should even read the play. At length 
in 1669, when circumstances were more favourable, 
Louis XIV. granted the desired permission ; in its 
proper name Moliere's play obtained complete free- 
dom. Bourdaloue might still pronounce condemnation ; 
Bossuet might draw terrible morals from the author's 
sudden death ; an actor, armed with the sword of the 
comic spirit, had proved victorious. And yet the theolo- 
gians were not wholly wrong ; the tendency of Moliere's 
teaching, like that of Rabelais and like that of Montaigne, 
is to detach morals from religion, to vindicate whatever 
is natural, to regard good sense and good feeling as 
sufficient guides of conduct. 

There is an accent of indignation in the play ; the 
follies of men and women may be subjects of sport; 
base egoism assuming the garb of religion deserves a 
lash that draws the blood. Is it no act of natural piety 
to defend the household against the designs of greedy 
and sensual imposture ; no service to society to quicken 
the penetration of those who may be made the dupes of 
selfish craft ? While Orgon and his mother are besotted 
by the gross pretensions of the hypocrite, while the 
young people contend for the honest joy of life, the 
voice of philosophic wisdom is heard through the saga- 
cious Cleimte, and that of frank good sense through 



DON JUAN : LE MISANTHROPE 203 

the waiting-maid, Dorine. Suddenly a providence, not 
divine but human, intervenes in the representative of the 
monarch and the law, and the criminal at the moment of 
triumph is captured in his own snare. 

When the affair of Tartufe was in its first tangle, 
Moliere produced a kind of dramatic counterpart — Don 
Juan, on le Festin de Pierre (1665). In Don Juan — whose 
valet Sganarelle is the faithful critic of his master — the 
dramatist presented one whose cynical incredulity and 
scorn of all religion are united with the most complete 
moral licence ; but hypocrisy is the fashion of the day, 
and Don Juan in sheer effrontery will invest himself for 
an hour in the robe of a penitent. Atheist and libertine as 
he is, there is a certain glamour of reckless courage about 
the figure of his hero, recreated by Moliere from a 
favourite model of Spanish origin. His comedy, while 
a vigorous study of character, is touched with the light 
of romance. 

These are masterpieces ; but neither Tartufe nor Don 
Juan expresses so much of the mind of Moliere as does 
Le Misanthrope (1666). His private griefs, his public 
warfare, had doubtless a little hardened and a little em- 
bittered his spirit. In many respects it is a sorry world ; 
and yet we must keep on terms with it. The misan- 
thropist Alceste is nobly fanatical on behalf of sincerity 
and rectitude. How does his sincerity serve the world 
or serve himself ? And he, too, has his dose of human 
folly, for is he not enamoured of a heartless coquette ? 
Philinte is accommodating, and accepts the world for 
what it is ; and yet, we might ask, is there not a more 
settled misanthropy in such cynical acquiescence than 
there is in the intractable virtue of Alceste ? Alone of 
Moliere' s plays, Le Misanthrope has that Shakespearean 



204 FRENCH LITERATURE 

obscurity which leaves it open to various interpretations. 
It is idle to try to discover actual originals for the charac- 
ters. But we may remember that when Alceste cried to 
Celimene, " C'est pour mes peches que je vous aime," the 
actors who stood face to face were Moliere and the wife 
whom he now met only on the stage. 

Moliere's genius could achieve nothing higher than 
Tartufe and the Misanthrope. His powers suffered no 
decline, but he did not again put them to such strenuous 
uses. In 1668 the brilliant fantasy of Amphitryon, freely 
derived from Plautus, was succeeded by an admirable 
comedy in prose, Georges Dandin, in which the folly of 
unequal marriage between the substantial farmer and 
the fine lady is mocked with bitter gaiety. Before the 
year closed Moliere, continuing to write in prose, returned 
to Plautus, and surpassed him in L'Avare. To be rich 
and miserly is in itself a form of fatuity ; but Harpagon 
is not only miserly but amorous, as far as a ruling passion 
will admit one of subordinate influence. Le Bourgeois 
Gentilhomme (1670), a lesson of good sense to those who 
suffer from the social ambition to rise above their proper 
rank, is wholly original ; it mounts in the close from 
comedy to the extravagance of farce, and perhaps in the 
uproarious laughter of the play we may discover a touch 
of effort or even of spasm. The operatic Psyche (1671) 
is memorable as having combined the talents of Moliere, 
Corneille, and Quinault, with the added musical gifts of 
Lulli. 

In Les Femmcs Savant es (1672) Moliere returned to an 
early theme, with variations suited to the times. The Hotel 
de Rambouillet was closed ; the new tribe of precieuses 
had learnt the Cartesian philosophy, affected the sciences, 
were patronesses of physics, astronomy, anatomy. Some- 



thing of the old romantic follies survived, and mingled 
strangely with the pretensions to science and the pedan- 
tries of erudition. Trissotin (doubtless a portrait in 
caricature from the Abbe Cotin) is the Tartufe of spu- 
rious culture ; Vadius (a possible satire of Menage) is a 
pedant, arrogant and brutal. Shall the charming Hen- 
riette be sacrificed to gratify her mother's domineering 
temper and the base designs of an impostor ? The 
forces are arrayed on either side ; the varieties of 
learned and elegant folly in woman are finely distin- 
guished; of the opposite party are Chrysale, the bourgeois 
father with his rude common-sense; the sage Ariste ; 
the faithful servant, Martine, whose grammar may be 
faulty, but whose wit is sound and clear ; and Henriette 
herself, the adorable, whom to know is more of a 
liberal education than to have explored all the Greek 
and Latin masters of Vadius and Trissotin. The final 
issue of the encounter between good sense, good 
nature, reason and folly, pedantry and pride, cannot 
be uncertain. 

Le Malade Imaginaire was written when Moliere was 
suffering from illness ; but his energy remained indomi- 
table. The comedy continued that long polemic against 
the medical faculty which he had sustained in L Amour 
Median, Monsieur de Pourceattgnac, and other plays. 
Moliere had little faith in any art which professes to 
mend nature ; the physicians were the impostors of a 
learned hygiene. It was the dramatist's last jest at the 
profession. While playing the part of Argan on Feb- 
ruary 17, 1673, the " Malade Imaginaire " fell dying on 
the stage ; he forced a laugh, but could not continue 
his part ; at ten o'clock he was no more. Through the 
exertions of his widow a religious funeral was permitted 



206 FRENCH LITERATURE 

to an actor who had died unfortified by the rites of the 
Church. 

Many admirable though slighter pieces served as the 
relief of his mind between the effort of his chief works. 
In all, gaiety and good sense interpenetrate each other. 
Kindly natured and generous, Moliere, a great observer, 
who looked through the deeds of men, was often taci- 
turn — le contemplateur of Boileau — and seemingly self- 
absorbed, like many persons of artistic tempera- 
ment, he loved splendour of life ; but he was liberal 
in his largess to those who claimed his help. He 
brought comedy to nature, and made it a study of 
human life. His warfare was against all that is unreal 
and unnatural. He preached the worth of human 
happiness, good sense, moderation, humorous toler- 
ance. He does not indulge in heroics, and yet there 
is heroism in his courageous outlook upon things. The 
disciple of Moliere cannot idealise the world into a scene 
of fairyland ; he will conceive man as far from perfect, 
perhaps as far from perfectible ; but the world is our 
habitation ; let us make it a cheerful one with the aid 
of a sane temper and an energetic will. As a writer, 
Moliere is not free from faults ; but his defects of style 
are like the accidents that happen within the bounds 
of a wide empire. His stature is not diminished when 
he is placed among the greatest European figures. " I 
read some pieces of Moliere's every year," said Goethe, 
"just as from time to time I contemplate the engravings 
after the great Italian masters. For we little men are 
not able to retain the greatness of such things within 
ourselves." 

To study the contemporaries and immediate successors 
of Moliere in comedy — Thomas Corneille, Quinault, 



PHILIPPE QUINAULT 207 

Montfleury, Boursault, Baron — would be to show how 
his genius dominates that of all his fellows. The reader 
may well take this fact for granted. 1 



II 

With the close of the sanguinary follies of the Fronde, 
with the inauguration of the personal government of Louis 
XIV. and the triumph of an absolute monarchy, a period 
of social and political reorganisation began. The court 
became the centre for literature ; to please courtiers and 
great ladies was to secure prosperity and fame ; the arts 
of peace were magnificently ordered ; the conditions 
were favourable to ideals of grace and beauty rather 
than of proud sublimity ; to isolate one's self was impos- 
sible ; literature became the pastime of a cultivated 
society ; it might be a trivial pastime, but in fitting hands 
it might become a noble pleasure. 

The easier part was chosen by Philippe Quinault, 
the more arduous by Racine. Quinault (1635-88) had 
given his first comedy as early as 1653 ; in tragedies 
and tragi - comedies which followed, he heaped up 
melodramatic incidents, but could not base them upon 
characters strongly conceived, or passion truly felt. A 
frigid sentimentality replaces passion, and this is expressed 
with languorous monotony. Love reigns supreme in his 
theatre ; but love, as interpreted by Quinault, is a kind 
of dulcet gallantry. His tragedy Astrate (1663) was not 
the less popular because its sentiment was in the con- 
ventional mode. One comedy by Quinault, La Mere 

1 An excellent guide will be found in Victor Fournel's Le Thidtre au xvii. 
Slide, La Comedie. 



208 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Coquette, is happy in its plot and in its easy style. But 
he did not find his true direction until he declined — or 
should we rather say, until he rose ? — into the librettist 
for the operas of Lulli. His lyric gifts were consider- 
able ; he could manipulate his light and fragile material 
with extraordinary skill. The tests of truth and reality 
were not applied to such verse ; if it was decorative, 
the listeners were satisfied. The opera flourished, and 
literature suffered through its pseudo-poetics. But the 
libretti of Quinault and the ballets of Benserade are 
representative of the time, and in his mythological or 
chivalric inventions Benserade sometimes could attain 
to the poetry of graceful fantasy. 

Quinault retired from the regular drama almost at the 
moment when Racine appeared. Born at La Ferte-Milon 
in 1639, son of a procureur and comptroller of salt, JEAN 
Racine lost both parents while a child. His widowed 
grandmother retired to Port-Royal in 1649. After six 
years' schooling at Beauvais the boy passed into the 
tutelage of the Jansenists, and among his instructors 
was the devout and learned Nicole. Solitude, religion, 
the abbey woods, Virgil, Sophocles, Euripides — these 
were the powers that fostered his genius. Already he 
was experimenting in verse. At nineteen he continued 
his studies in Paris, where the little abbe Le Vasseur, 
who knew the salons and haunted the theatre, introduced 
him to mundane pleasures. Racine's sensitive, mobile 
character could easily adapt itself to the world. His 
ode on the marriage of the King, La Nymphe de la Seine, 
corrected by Chapelain (for to bring Tritons into a river 
was highly improper), won him a gift of louis d'or. But 
might not the world corrupt the young Port-Royalist's 
innocence ? The company of ladies of the Marais 



RACINE'S EARLY PLAYS 



209 



Theatre and that of La Fontaine might not tend to 
edification. So thought Racine's aunts ; and, with the 
expectation that he would take orders, he was exiled to 
Uzes, where his uncle was vicar-general, and where the 
nephew could study the Summa of theology, but also 
the Odyssey, the odes of Pindar, Petrarch, and the pretty 
damsels who prayed in the cathedral church. 

In 1663 he was again in Paris, was present at royal 
levees, and in Boileau's chambers renewed his acquaint- 
ance with La Fontaine, and became a companion of 
Moliere. His vocation was not that of an ecclesiastic. 
Two dramatic works of earlier date are lost ; his first 
piece that appeared before the public, La Tke'baide, was 
presented in 1664 by Moliere's company. It is a tragedy 
written in discipleship to Rotrou and to Corneille, and 
the pupil was rather an imitator of Corneille's infirmities 
than of his excellences. Alexandre followed towards the 
close of the ensuing year — a feeble play, in which the 
mannered gallantry of the time was liberally transferred 
to the kings of India and their Macedonian conqueror. 
But amorous sighs were the mode, and there was a 
young grand monarch who might discover himself in 
the person of the magnanimous hero. The success was 
great, though Saint-Evremond pronounced his censures, 
and Corneille found ridiculous the trophies erected upon 
the imagined ruins of his own. Discontented with the 
performers at the Palais-Royal, Racine offered his play 
to the Hotel de Bourgogne ; Moliere's best actress 
seceded to the rival house. Racine's ambition may 
excuse, but cannot justify an injurious act ; a breach 
between the friends was inevitable. 

Boileau remained now, as ever, loyal — loyal for warn- 
ing as well as for encouragement. Nicole, the former 



2io FRENCH LITERATURE 

guide of Racine's studies, in his Visionnaires, had spoken 
of dramatic poets as " public poisoners." The reproach 
was taken to himself by Racine, and in two letters, written 
with some of the spirit of the Provinciates, he turned his 
wit against his Jansenist friends. Thanks to Boileau's 
wise and firm counsel, the second of these remained 
unpublished. 

Madame de Sevigne was the devoted admirer of the 
great Corneille, but when she witnessed his young rival's 
Andromaque she yielded to its pathos six reluctant tears. 
On its first appearance in 1667 a triumph almost equal 
to that of the Cid was secured. Never before had grace 
and passion, art and nature, ideality and truth, been so 
united in the theatre of France. Racine did not seek 
for novelty in the choice of a subject ; Euripides had 
made Andromache familiar to the Greek stage. The 
invention of Racine was of a subtler kind than that 
which manufactures incidents and constructs a plot. 
Like Raphael in the art of painting, he could accept a 
well-known theme and renew it by the finest processes 
of genius. He did not need an extraordinary action, or 
personages of giant proportions ; the simpler the intrigue, 
the better could he concentrate the interest on the states 
of a soul ; the more truly and deeply human the char- 
acters, the more apt were they for betraying the history 
of a passion. In its purity of outline, its harmony of 
proportions, Andromaque was Greek ; in its sentiment, 
it gained something from Christian culture ; in its 
manners, there was a certain reflection of the Versailles 
of Louis XIV. It was at once classical and modern, 
and there was no discordance between qualities which 
had been rendered, to borrow a word from Shakespeare, 
"harmonious charmingly." With Andromaque French 



LES PLAIDEURS 21 r 

tragedy ceased to be oratorical, and became essentially- 
poetic. 

Adversaries there were, such as success calls forth ; 
the irritable poet retorted with epigrams of a kind which 
multiply and perpetuate enmities. His true reprisal 
was another work, Britannicus y establishing his fame 
in another province of tragedy. But before Britannicus 
appeared he had turned aside, as if his genius needed 
recreation,to produce the comedy, or farce, or buffoonery, 
or badinage, or mockery (for it is all these), Les Plaideurs. 
It may be that his failure in a lawsuit moved Racine to 
have his jest at the gentlemen of the Palais ; he and his 
friends of the tavern of the Mouton Blanc — Furetiere 
among them — may have put their wits together to de- 
vise material for laughter, and discussed how far The 
Wasps of Aristophanes could be acclimatised in Paris. 
At first the burlesque was meant for an Italian troupe, 
but Scaramouche left the town, and something more 
carefully developed would be expected at the Hotel 
de Bourgogne. The play was received with hisses, but 
Moliere did not fear to laugh at what was comic, whether 
he laughed according to the rules or against them. A 
month later, at a court performance, Louis XIV. laughed 
loudly ; the courtiers quickly discovered Racine's wit, 
and the laughter was echoed by all loyal citizens. In 
truth, there is laughing matter in the play ; the pro- 
fessional enthusiasm of Dandin, the judge, who wears 
his robe and cap even in bed, the rage and rapture 
of litigation in Chicanneau and the Countess, have in 
them something of nature beneath the caricature ; in 
the buffoonery there is a certain extravagant grace. 

Les Plaidenrs, however, was only an interlude be- 
tween graver efforts. Britannicus (1669), founded on the 



212 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Annals of Tacitus, exhibits with masterly power Nero's 
adolescence in crime ; the young tiger has grace and 
strength, but the instinct of blood needs only to be 
awakened within him. Agrippine is a superb incarnation 
of womanly ambition, a Roman sister of Athalie. The 
play was at first coldly received ; Corneille and his cabal 
did not spare their censures. In a preface Racine struck 
back, but afterwards repented of his bitter words and 
withdrew them. The critics, as he says in a later pre- 
face, disappeared ; the piece remained. His conception 
of tragedy in contrast with that of Corneille was denned 
by him in memorable words — what is natural should 
be sought rather than what is extraordinary ; the action 
should be simple, " chargee de peu de matiere " ; it should 
advance gradually towards the close, sustained by the 
interests, sentiments, and passions of the personages. 

The sprightly Henrietta of England, Duchess of 
Orleans, seems to have conceived the idea of bringing 
the rivalry between the old dramatic poet and his young 
successor to a decisive test. She proposed to each, 
without the other's knowledge, a subject for a tragedy— 
the parting, for reasons of State policy, of two royal 
lovers, Titus, Emperor of Rome, and Berenice, Queen 
of Palestine. Perhaps Henrietta mischievously thought 
of the relations of her friend Marie de Mancini with 
Louis XIV. The plays appeared almost simultaneously 
in November 1670 ; Corneille's was before long with- 
drawn ; Racine's Berenice, in which the penetrating voice 
of La Champmesle interpreted the sorrows of the heroine, 
obtained a triumph. Yet the elegiac subject is hardly 
suited to tragedy • a situation rather than an action is 
presented ; it neededail the poet's resources to prevent 
the scenes from being stationary. In Berenice there is 



BAJAZET: MITHRIDATE: IPHIGENIE 213 

a suavity in grief which gives a grace to her passion ; the 
play, if not a drama of power, is the most charming of 
elegiac tragedies. 

Bajazet (1672), a tragedy of the seraglio, although the 
role of the hero is feeble, has virile qualities. The fury 
of Eastern passion, a love resembling hate, is represented 
in the Sultana Roxane. In the Vizier Acomat, deliberate 
in craft, intrepid in danger, Racine proved, as he proved 
by his Nero and his Joad, that he was not always doomed 
to fail in his characters of men. The historical events 
were comparatively recent ; but in the perspective of 
the theatre, distance may produce the idealising effect 
of time. The story was perhaps found by Racine in 
Floridon, a tale by Segrais. The heroine of Mithridate 
(1673), the noble daughter of Ephesus, Monime, queen 
and slave, is an ideal of womanly love, chastity, fidelity, 
sacrifice ; gentle, submissive, and yet capable of lofty 
courage. The play unites the passions of romance with 
a study of large political interests hardly surpassed by 
Corneille. The cabal which gathered head against Baja- 
zet could only whisper its malignities when Mithridate 
appeared. 

Iphigenie, which is freely imitated from Euripides, was 
given at the fetes of Versailles in the summer of 1674. 
The French Iphigenia is enamoured of Achilles, and 
death means for her not only departure from the joy 
of youth and the light of the sun, but the loss of love. 
Here, as elsewhere, Racine complicates the moral situa- 
tion with cross and counter loves: Eriphile is created to 
be the jealous rival of Iphigenie, and to be her substitute 
in the sacrifice of death. The ingenious transpositions, 
which were necessary to adapt a Greek play to Versailles 
in the second half of the seventeenth century, called forth 



214 FRENCH LITERATURE 

hostile criticisms. Through miserable intrigues a com- 
peting Jpkigenie, the work of Le Clerc and Coras, was 
produced in the spring of 1675 ; it was born dead, and 
five days later it was buried. 

The hostilities culminated two years later. It is com- 
monly said that Racine wrote in the conventional and 
courtly taste of his own day. In reality his presentation 
of tragic passions in their terror and their truth shocked 
the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode. He 
was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered 
and repelled. It was known that Racine was engaged on 
Phedre. The Duchesse de Bouillon and her brother the 
Due de Nevers were arbiters of elegance in literature, 
and decreed that it should fail. A rival play on the same 
subject was ordered from Pradon ; and to insure her 
victory the Duchess, at a cost of fifteen thousand livres, as 
Boileau declares, engaged the front seats of two theatres 
for six successive evenings — the one to be packed with 
applauding spectators, the other to exhibit empty benches, 
diversified with creatures who could hiss. Nothing could 
dignify Pradon's play, as nothing could really degrade 
that of Racine. But Racine was in the highest degree 
sensitive, and such a desperate plot against his fame 
might well make him pause and reflect. 

Phedre, like Iphigenie, is a new creation from Euripides. 
Its singular beauty has been accurately defined as a 
mingling of horror and compassion, of terror and curio- 
sity. It is less a drama than one great part, and that part 
consists of a diseased state of the soul, a morbid conflict 
of emotions, so that the play becomes overmuch a study 
in the pathology of passion. The greatness of the role 
of the heroine constitutes the infirmity of the play as a 
whole ; the other characters seem to exist only for the 






RACINE'S RETIREMENT 215 

sake of deploying the inward struggle of which Phedre 
is the victim. Love and jealousy rage within her ; 
remorse follows, for something of Christian sentiment 
is conveyed by Racine into his classical fable. Never 
had his power as a psychologist in art been so won- 
derfully exhibited ; yet he had elsewhere attained more 
completely the ideal of the drama. In the succession 
of his profane masterpieces we may say of the last 
that it is lesser than the first and greater. Phedre lacks 
the balance and proportion of Andromaque ; but never 
had Racine exhibited the tempest and ravage of passion 
in a woman's soul on so great a scale or with force so 
terrible. 

The cabal might make him pause ; his own play, pro- 
foundly moralised as it was, might cause him to consider. 
Events of the day, crimes of passion, adulteries, poison- 
ings, nameless horrors, might agitate his spirit. Had he 
not fed the full-blown passions of the time ? What if 
Nicole's word that playwrights were public poisoners 
should be true ? Probably various causes operated on 
the mobile spirit of Racine ; certainly the Christian, of 
Jansenist education, who had slumbered within him, now 
awakened. He resolved to quit the world and adopt the 
Carthusian habit. The advice of his confessor was that 
he should regulate his life by marriage. Racine yielded, 
and found his contentment in a wife who was ignorant of 
his plays, and in children whose inclinations and training 
were religious. The penitent was happy in his house- 
hold, happy also in his reconciliation with Nicole and 
Arnauld. To Boileau he remained attached. And he 
did not renounce the court. Was not the King the 
anointed vicegerent of God, who could not be too much 
honoured ? He accepted, with Boileau as fellow-labourer, 



216 FRENCH LITERATURE 

the position of the King's historiographer, and endea- 
voured to fulfil its duties. 

Twelve years after his withdrawal from the theatre, 
Racine, at the request of Madame de Maintenon, com- 
posed his Biblical tragedy of Esther (1688-89) f° r her 
cherished schoolgirls at Saint-Cyr. The subject was not 
unaptly chosen — a prudent and devout Esther now helped 
to guide the fortunes of France, and she was surrounded 
at Saint-Cyr by her chorus of young daughters of Sion. 
Esther was rendered by the pupils, with graceful splen- 
dours, before the King, and the delight was great. The 
confidante of the Persian Queen indeed forgot her words ; 
at Racine's hasty complaint the young actress wept, and 
the poet, weeping with her, wiped away her tears. 

Esther is a melodious play, exquisite in its refined style 
and delicate versification ; but the characters are faintly 
drawn. Its novelty lay in its lyrical movements and in 
the poetical uses of its finely-imagined spectacle. Madame 
de Maintenon or her directors feared that the excitement 
and ambitions of another play in costume might derange 
the spirits of her girls, and when Athalie was recited at 
Versailles, in January 1691, it was little of an event ; the 
play passed almost unnoticed. A noisy reception, indeed, 
would have been no fitting tribute to its solemn beauty. 
All Racine's religious feeling, all his domestic tenderness 
are united in Athalie with his matured feeling for Greek 
art. The great protagonist is the Divine Being ; Provi- 
dence replaces the fate of the ancient drama. A child 
(for Racine was still an innovator in the French theatre) 
was the centre of the action ; the interests were political, 
or rather national, in the highest sense ; the events were, 
as formerly, the developments of inward character ; but 
events and characters were under the presiding care of 



ATHALIE 217 

God. The tragedy is lyrical, not merely through the 
chorus, which expresses common emotions of devout joy 
and fear, indignation, praise, and rapture. The chorus is 
less developed here, and its chants are less impressive 
than in Esther. There is, however, a lyrism, personal 
and modern, in the prophetic inspiration of the High 
Priest, and Racine anticipated that his boldness in pre- 
senting this might be censured by his contemporaries. 
The unity of place, which had been disregarded in Esther, 
is here preserved ; the scene is the temple at Jerusalem ; 
and by its impressive grandeur, and the awful associations 
of the place, the spectacle may be said to take part in the 
action of the play. Perhaps it would be no exaggera- 
tion to assert that grandeur and beauty are nowhere else 
so united in French dramatic art as in Athalie ; perhaps 
it might truly be described as flawless in majesty and 
grace. 

A light disfavour of the King saddened, and perhaps 
hastened, the close of Racine's life. Port-Royal was 
regarded as a centre of rebellious heresy ; and Racine's 
piety to his early masters was humble and devout. He 
had further offended' by drawing up a memorandum on 
the sufferings of the French people resulting from the 
wars. Madame de Maintenon assured him that the cloud 
would pass ; but the favour of death, accepted with 
tranquillity, came before the returning favour of the 
poet's master. He died in April 1699, soon after he had 
entered his sixtieth year. 

The highest distinction of the drama of Racine is its 
truth to nature — truth, that is, in its interpretation and 
rendering of human passion. Historical accuracy and 
local colour concerned him as tar as they were needful 
with his courtly spectators for verisimilitude. The flue- 



218 FRENCH LITERATURE 

tuations of passion he studies to most advantage in his 
characters of women. Love, in all its varieties, from the 
passion of Roxane or Phedre to the pure devotion of 
Berenice, Iphigenie, or Monime ; maternal tenderness 
or the tenderness of the foster-mother (Andromaque, 
Clytemnestre, Josabeth) ; female ambition (Agrippine, 
Athalie) — these are the themes of his exposition. His 
style has been justly characterised as a continual crea- 
tion ; its audacity underlies its suavity; its miracles are 
accomplished with the simplest means. His vocabulary 
is singularly small, yet with such a vocabulary he can 
attain the rarest effects. From sustained dignity he can 
pass suddenly, when the need arises, to the most direct 
familiarity. The music of his verse is seldom rich or 
sonorous ; it is at once a pure vehicle for the idea and a 
delicate caress to the senses. 



CHAPTER VII 

BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS— FENELON 

I 

"A man set under authority" — these words, better than 
any other, define Bossuet. Above him was God, repre- 
sented in things spiritual by the Catholic Church, in 
things temporal by the French monarchy ; below him 
were the faithful confided to his charge, and those who 
would lead the faithful astray from the path of obedi- 
ence and tradition. Duty to what was above him, duty 
to those placed under him, made up the whole of 
Bossuet's life. To maintain, to defend, to extend the 
tradition he had received, was the first of duties. All 
his powers as an orator, a controversialist, an educator 
were directed to this object. He wrote and spoke to 
dominate the intellects of men and to subdue their 
wills, not for the sake of personal power, but for the 
truth as he had received it from the Church and from 
the monarchy. 

Jacques - Benigne Bossuet was born in 1627, at 
Dijon, of a middle-class family, distinguished in the 
magistracy. In his education, pursued with resolute 
ardour, the two traditions of Hellenism and Hebraism 
were fused together : Homer and Virgil were much to 
him ; but the Bible, above all, nourished his imagination, 



220 FRENCH LITERATURE 

his conscience, and his will. The celebrity of his scholar- 
ship and the flatteries of Parisian salons did not divert 
him from his course. At twenty-five he was a priest 
and a doctor of the Sorbonne. Six years were spent 
at Metz, a city afflicted by the presence of Protestants 
and Jews, where Bossuet fortified himself with theo- 
logical studies, preached, panegyrised the saints, and 
confuted heretics. His fame drew him to Paris, where, 
during ten years, his sermons were among the great 
events of the time. In 1669 he was named Bishop of 
Condom, but, being appointed preceptor to the Dauphin, 
he resigned his bishopric, and devoted himself to form- 
ing the mind of a pupil, indolent and dull, who might 
one day be the vicegerent of God for his country. 
Bishop of Meaux in 1681, he opened the assembly of 
French clergy next year with his memorable sermon 
on the unity of the Church, and by his authority carried, 
in a form decisive for freedom while respectful towards 
Rome, the four articles which formulated the liberties 
of the Gallican Church. The duties of his diocese, 
controversy against Protestantism, the controversy 
against Quietism, in which Fenelon was his antagonist, 
devotional writings, strictures upon the stage, contro- 
versy against the enlightened Biblical criticism of 
Richard Simon, filled his energetic elder years. He 
ceased from a life of glorious labour and resolute 
combat in April 1704. 

The works of Bossuet, setting aside his commentaries 
on Holy Scripture, devotional treatises, and letters, fall 
into three chief groups : the eloquence of the pulpit, 
controversial writings, and writings designed for the 
instruction of the Dauphin. 

Political eloquence could not exist where power was 



BOSSUET'S SERMONS 221 

grasped by the hands of one great ruler. Judicial elo- 
quence lacked the breadth and elevation which come 
with political freedom ; it contented itself with subtleties 
of argument, decked with artificial flowers of style. The 
pulpit was the school of oratory. St. Vincent de Paul 
had preached with unction and a grave simplicity, and 
Bossuet, his disciple, felt his influence. But the offering 
which Bossuet laid upon the altar must needs be costly, 
an offering of all his powers. While an unalterable good 
sense regulates all he wrote, the sweep of his intellect 
demanded plenitude of expression ; his imagination, if it 
dealt with life and death, must needs deal with them at 
times in the way of magnificence, which was natural to 
it ; and his lyrical enthusiasm, fed by the prophetic 
poetry of the Old Testament, could not but find an 
escape in words. He sought no literary fame ; his ser- 
mons were acts of faith, acts of duty. Out of the vast 
mass of his discourses he printed one, a sermon of public 
importance — that on the unity of the Church. 

At the request of friends, some of the Funeral Orations 
were published. These, with his address on the profes- 
sion of Louise de La Valliere, were all that could be 
read of Bossuet's pulpit oratory by his contemporaries. 
His sermons were carefully meditated and prepared, but 
he would not check his power of lofty improvisation by 
following the words of a manuscript. After his death his 
papers had perilous adventures. By the devotion of his 
first editor, Deforis, nearly two hundred sermons were 
after many years recovered ; later students have presented 
them with as close an approximation as is possible to 
their original form. Bossuet's first manner — that of 
the years at Metz — is sometimes marred by scholastic 
subtleties, a pomp of quotations, too curious imagery, 



222 FRENCH LITERATURE 

and a temper rather aggressive than conciliating. During 
the period when he preached in Paris he was master of 
a 1 l his powers, which move with freedom and at the 
same time with a majestic order ; his grandeur grows 
out cf simplicity. As Bishop of Meaux he exhorted his 
flock out of the abundance of his heart, often without the 
intermediary of written preparation. 

He is primarily a doctor of the faith : dogma first, de- 
termined by authority, and commending itself to human 
reason ; morality, not independent, but proceeding from 
or connected with dogma, and while truly human yet 
resting upon divine foundations. But neither dogma 
nor morals are presented in the manner of the schools ; 
both are made living powers by the preacher's awe, 
adoration, joy, charity, indignation, pity ; in the large 
ordonnance of his discourse each passion finds its 
natural place. His eloquence grows out of his theme ; 
his logic is the logic of clear and natural ideas ; he is 
lucid, rapid, energetic ; then suddenly some aspect of 
his subject awakens a lyrical emotion, and the preacher 
rises into the prophet. 

Bossuet's panegyrics of the saints are sermons in 
which doctrine and morals are enforced by great 
examples. His Oraisons Funebres preach, for the uses of 
the living, the doctrine of death. Nowhere else does he 
so fill the mind with a sense of the greatness and the 
glory of life as when he stands beside the bier and re- 
views the achievements or presents the characters of the 
illustrious deceased. Observing as he did all the decorum 
of the occasion, his discourses do not degenerate into 
mere adulation ; some are historic surveys, magnificent 
in their breadth of view and mastery of events. He pre- 
sents things as he saw them, and he did not always see 



BOSSUET IN CONTROVERSY 223 

aright. Cromwell is a hypocrite and an impostor ; the 
revocation of the edict of Nantes is the laudable act of a 
king who is a defender of the faith. The intolerance of 
Bossuet proceeds not so much from his heart as from 
the logic of his orthodoxy. His heart had a tender- 
ness which breaks forth in many places, and signally in 
the discourse occasioned by the death of the Duchess 
of Orleans. This, and the eloquent memorials of her 
mother, Henrietta, Queen of England, and of the Prince 
de Conde, touch the heights and depths of the passions 
proper to the grave. 

Bossuet's polemic against Protestantism is sufficiently 
represented by his Exposition de la Doctrine Catholique 
(published 1671) and the Histoire des Variations des Eglis'es 
Protestantes (1688). The latter, in its fifteen books, is an 
attempt to overwhelm the contending Protestant com- 
munions by one irresistible attack. Their diversities of 
error are contrasted with the one, unchanging faith of 
the infallible Church. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, 
the Albigenses, the Hussites, the Wicliffites are routed 
and slain, as opponents are slain in theological warfare 
— to rise again. History and theology co-operate in 
the result. The characters of the Protestant Reformers 
are studied with a remorseless scrutiny, and an art 
which can bring into relief what the work of art re- 
quires. Why the children of the infallible Church 
rose up in disobedience against their mother is left un- 
explained. The great heresy, Bossuet was persuaded, 
had almost reached its term ; the intellectual chaos 
would soon be restored to universal order under the 
successors of Innocent XI. 

In the embittered controversy with his brother-Bishop 
of Cambrai, on the significance of which the singular 



224 FRENCH LITERATURE 

autobiography of Madame Guyon l throws much light, 
Bossuet remained the victor. It was a contention 
between dogmatic rectitude and the temper of emo- 
tional religion. Bossuet was at first unversed in the 
writings of the Catholic mystics. Being himself a fully- 
formed will, watchful and armed for obedience and 
command — the "man under authority" — he rightly 
divined the dangers to dogmatic faith arising from self- 
abandonment to God within the heart. The elaborate 
structure of orthodoxy seemed to dissolve in the ardour 
of a personal emotion; it seemed to him another form 
of the individualism which he condemned. The Church 
was a great objective reality ; it had laid down a system 
of belief. A love of God which ignored the method of 
God, was but a spurious love, leading to destruction. 

Protestant self-will, mystical private emotion — these 
were in turn met by the champion of tradition, and, as 
he trusted, were subdued. Another danger he perceived, 
not in the unregenerate will or wandering heart, but in 
the critical intelligence. Bossuet again was right in view- 
ing with alarm the Biblical studies of Richard Simon. 
But his scholarship was here defective. He succeeded 
in suppressing an edition of the Histoire Ci-itique du Vieux 
Testament. There were printers in Holland beyond the 
reach of Bossuet's arm ; and Simon continued the work 
which others have carried further with the aids of more 
exact science. 

To doubt the government of His world by the Divine 
Ruler, who assigns us our duty and our place, is to 
sap the principles of authority and of obedience. The 
doctrine of God's providence is at the centre of all 
Bossuet's system of thought, at the heart of his loyal 

1 Translated into English for the first time in full, 1897, by T. T. Allen. 



BOSSUET ON UNIVERSAL HISTORY 225 

passions. On earth, the powers that be ; in France, 
the monarch ; in heaven, a greater Monarch (we will 
not say a magnified Louis XIV.) presiding over all the 
affairs of this globe. When Bossuet tried to educate 
his indocile pupil the Dauphin, he taught him how God 
is above man, as man is above the brute. Monarchy — 
as he showed in his Politique Tiree de VEcriture Sainte — is 
hereditary and absolute ; but absolute power is not arbi- 
trary power ; the King is God's subject, and his laws 
must conform to those of his Divine Ruler. The Discours 
sur FHistoire Universelle (1681) was written in the first 
instance for the Dauphin ; but its purpose was partly 
apologetic, and Bossuet, especially in the second part 
of the book, had the errors of free-thinkers — Spinoza 
and Simon — before his mind. 

The seventeenth century had not contributed largely 
to historical literature, save in the form of memoirs. 
Mezeray, in the first half of the century, Fleury, in the 
second, cannct be ranked among those writers who 
illuminate with profound and just ideas. The Cartesian 
philosophy viewed historical studies with haughty in- 
difference. Bos-;uet's Discours is a vindication of the 
ways of God in history, a theology of human progress. 
He would exhibit the nations and generations of 
human-kind bound each to each under the Providen- 
tial government. The life of humanity, from Adam 
to Charlemagne, is mapped into epochs, ages, periods — 
the periods of nature, of the law, and of grace. In 
religion is found the unity of human history. By reli- 
gion is meant Judaism and Christianity; by Christianity 
is meant the Catholicism of Rome. 

Having expounded the Divine policy in the govern- 
ment of the world, Bossuet is free to study those 



226 FRENCH LITERATURE 

secondary causes which have determined the rise and 
fall of empires. With magisterial authority, and with 
majestic skill, he presents the movements of races and 
peoples. His sympathy with the genius of ancient 
Rome proceeds not only from his comprehensive grasp 
of facts, but from a kinship between his own and the 
Roman type of character. The magnificent design of 
Bossuet was magnificently accomplished. He hoped 
to extend his studies, and apply his method to other 
parts of his vast subject, but the hope was not to be 
fulfilled. A disinterested student of the philosophy of 
history he is not ; he is the theologian who marshals 
facts under an accepted dogma. A conception of Pro- 
vidence may indeed emerge from the researches of a 
devout investigator of the life of humanity as their last 
result; but towards that conception the secular life and 
the various religions of the world will contribute ; the 
ways of the Divine Spirit will appear other than those 
of the anthropomorphic Ruler of Bossuet's imagination. 
He was not an original thinker ; he would have scorned 
such a distinction — " l'heretique est celui qui a une 
opinion " ; he had received the truth, and only gave 
it extended applications. He is "le sublime orateur des 
idees communes." 

More than an orator, before all else he was a com- 
batant. Falling at his post as the eighteenth century 
opened, he is like some majestic, white-haired paladin 
of old romances which tell of the strife between French 
chivalry and the Saracenic hordes. Bossuet fell ; the 
age of growing incredulity and novel faiths was in- 
augurated ; the infidels passed over the body of the 
champion of conservative tradition. 



BOURDALOUE 227 



II 

Bossuet's contemporaries esteemed' him as a preacher 
less highly than they esteemed the Jesuit Bourdaloue. 
The life of Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704) is told in 
the words of Vinet : " He preached, confessed, consoled, 
and then he died." It does credit to his hearers that 
they valued him aright — a modest man of simple probity. 
He spoke, with downcast eyes and full harmonious voice, 
as a soul to souls ; his eloquence was not that of the 
rhetorician ; his words were grave and plain and living, 
and were pressed home with the force of their reality. 
He aimed never at display, but always at conviction. 
When the crowd at St. Sulpice was moved as he 
entered the church and ascended the pulpit, " Silence ! " 
cried the Prince de Conde, u there is our enemy ! " 
Bourdaloue marshalled his arguments and expositions 
with the elaborate skill of a tactician ; he sought to 
capture the judgment ; he reached the heart through a 
wise director's knowledge of its inmost processes. When 
his words were touched with emotion, it was the in- 
voluntary manifestation of the life within him. His 
studies of character sometimes tended to the form of 
portraits of moral types, features in which could be 
identified with actual persons ; but in these he w: s 
the moralist, not the satirist. During, four-and-thirty 
years Bourdaloue distributed, to those who would take 
it, the bread of life — plain, wholesome, prepared skilfully 
and with clean hands, never varying from the evenness 
and excellence of its quality. He does not startle or 
dazzle a reader ; he does what is better — he nourishes. 

Bourdaloue pronounced only two Oraisons Funebres, 



228 FRENCH LITERATURE 

and those under the constraint of duty. He thought 
the Christian pulpit was meant for less worldly uses 
than the eulogy of mortal men. The Oraison Funebre 
was more to the taste of Mascaron (i 634-1 703), whoss 
unequal rhetoric was at its best in his panegyric of 
Turenne; more to the taste of the elegant FlEchier, 
Bishop of Nimes. All the literary graces were cultivated 
by Flechier (1632-1710), and his eloquence is unquestion- 
able ; but it was not the eloquence proper to the pulpit. 
He was a man of letters, a man of the world, formed 
in the school of preciosity, a haunter of the Hotel de 
Ramboui'let ; knowing the surface of society, he knew 
as a moralist how to depict its manners and the evil 
that lay in them. He did not apply doctrine to life 
like Bossuet, nor search the heart with Bourdaloue's 
serious zeal ; to save souls was indeed important ; to 
exhibit his talents before the King was also important. 
But the true eloquence of the pulpit has deeper springs 
than lay in Flechier's mundane spirit. Already the 
decadence has begun. 

Protestantism had its preacher in Jacques Saurin 
(1677-1730), clear, logical, energetic, with negligences 
of style and sudden flashes of genius. But he belongs 
to London, to Geneva, to the Hague more perhaps than 
to France. An autumnal colouring, bright and abund- 
ant, yet indicative of the decline, is displayed in the 
discourses of the latest of the great pulpit orators, Jean- 
Baptiste Massillon (1663-1742), who belongs more 
to the eighteenth than to the seventeenth century. 
" He must increase," said Bourdaloue, " but I must 
decrease." Massillon, with gifts of person and of natural 
grace, sensitive, tender, a student and professor of the 
rhetorical art, sincerely devout, yet with waverings 






MASSILLON 229 

towards the world, had something in his genius that 
resembled Racine. A pathetic sentiment, a feeling for 
human passions, give his sermons qualities which con- 
trast with the severer manner of Bourdaloue. They 
are simple in plan ; the preacher's art lay in deploying 
and developing a few ideas, and infusing into them a:i 
imaginative sensibility ; he is facile and abundant ; fault- 
less in amenity, but deficient in force and fire. Yet the 
opening words of the Funeral Oration on Louis XIV. — ■ 
" God alone is great, my brethren " — are noble in their 
simplicity; and the thought of Jesus suddenly appearing 
in "the most august assembly of the world" — in the 
chapel at Versailles — startled the hearers of the sermon 
on the . " small number of the elect." " There is an 
orator !" cried the actor Baron, "we are only comedians;" 
but no actor would have instituted a comparison between 
himself and Bourdaloue. "When one enters the avenue 
at Versailles," said Massillon, "one feels an enervating air." 
He was aware of the rising tide of luxury and vice 
around him ; he tried to meet it, tracing the scepticism 
of the time to its ill-regulated passions ; but he met 
scepticism by morality detached from dogma. The 
Petit Carane, preached before Louis XV. when a child 
of eight, expresses the sanguine temper of the moment : 
the young King would grow into the father of his people ; 
the days of peace would return. Great and beneficent 
kings are not effeminately amiable ; it were better if 
Massillon had preached "Be strong" than "Be tender." 
Voltaire kept on his desk the sermons of Massillon, and 
loved to hear the musical periods of the Petit Careme 
read aloud at meal-time. To be the favourite preacher 
of eighteenth-century philosophers is a distinction some- 
what compromising to an exponent of the faith. 



230 FRENCH LITERATURE 



III 

Bossuet's great antagonist in the controversy con- 
cerning Quietism might have found the approval of 
the philosophers for some of his political opinions. 
Mis religious writings would have spoken to them in 
an unknown tongue. 

Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fexelon was 
born in Perigord (1651), of an ancient and illustrious 
family. Of one whose intellect and character were in- 
finitely subtle and complex, the blending of all opposites, 
it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions, 
and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus. 
Saint-Simon noticed how in his noble countenance every 
contrary quality was expressed, and how all were har- 
monised : " II fallait faire effort pour cesser de le re- 
garder." During the early years of his clerical career 
he acted as superior to female converts from Pro- 
testantism, and as missionary among the unconverted 
Calvinists. In 1689 he was appointed tutor to the King's 
grandson, the Due de Bourgogne, and from a passionate 
boy he transformed his pupil into a youth too blindly 
docile. Fenelon's nomination to the Archbishopric of 
Cambrai (1695), which removed him from the court, was 
in fact a check to his ambition. His religious and his 
political views were regarded by Louis XIV. as dangerous 
for the Church and the monarchy. 

Through his personal interest in Mme. Guyon, and 
his sympathy with her mystical doctrine in religion — 
one which inculcated complete abnegation of the will, 
and its replacement by absolute surrender to the Divine 
love — he came into conflict with Bossuet, and after a 



FENELON 231 

fierce war of diplomacy and of pamphlets, in which 
Fenelon displayed the utmost skill and energy as tac- 
tician and dialectician, he received a temperate con- 
demnation from Rome, and submitted. The death of 
the Dauphin (171 1), which left his former pupil heir 
to the throne, revived Fenelon's hopes of political in- 
fluence, but in the next year these hopes disappeared 
with the decease of the young Due de Bourgogne. At 
Cambrai, where he discharged his episcopal duties like 
a saint and a grand seigneur, Fenelon died six months 
before Louis XIV., in 1715. 

"The most original intellect — if we set Pascal aside — 
of the seventeenth century" — so Fenelon is described 
by one excellent critic. " Antique and modern," writes 
his biographer, M. Paul Janet, "Christian and profane, 
mystical and diplomatic, familiar and noble, gentle and 
headstrong, natural and subtle, fascinating the eighteenth 
century as he had fascinated the seventeenth, believing 
like a child, and daring as Spinoza, Fenelon is one of 
the most original figures which the Catholic Church 
has produced." His first publication was the treatise 
De I' Education des Filles (written 1681, published 1687), 
composed at the request of his friends the Due and 
Duchesse de Beauvilliers. It is based on a recognition 
of the dignity of woman and the duty of a serious effort 
to form her mind. It honours the reason, opposes 
severity, would make instruction, as far as possible, a 
delight, and would exhibit goodness in a gracious aspect ; 
commends object-lessons in addition to book-learning, 
indicates characteristic feminine failings (yet liveliness 
of disposition is not regarded as one of these), exhorts 
to a dignified simplicity in dress. The range of studies 
recommended is narrow, but for Fenelon's time it was 



232 FRENCH LITERATURE 

liberal ;" the book marks an epoch in the history of 
female education. 

For his pupil the Due de Bourgogne, Fenelon wrote 
his graceful prose Fables (which also include under th t 
title short tales, allegories, and fairy stories), the Dialogues 
des Morts, aiming at the application of moral principles 
to politics, and his Telemaque, named in the first (incom- 
plete) edition Suite du IV e Livre de I' Odyssee (1699). In 
this, for long the most popular of tales for the young, 
Fenelon's imaginative devotion to antiquity finds ample 
expression ; it narrates the wanderings of Telemachus in 
search of his father Ulysses, under the warning guid- 
ance and guardianship of Minerva disguised as Mentor. 
Imitations and borrowings from classical authors are 
freely and skilfully made. It is a poem in prose, a 
romance of education, designed at once to charm the 
imagination and to inculcate truths of morals, politics, 
and religion. The didactic purpose is evident, yet it 
remains a true work of art, full of grace and colour, 
occasionally, indeed, languid, but often vivid and 
forcible. 

Fenelon's views on politics were not so much fantastic 
as those of an idealist. He dreamed of a monarchy 
which should submit to the control of righteousness ; 
he mourned over the pride and extravagance of the 
court ; he constantly pleaded against wars of ambition ; 
he desired that a powerful and Christian nobility should 
mediate between the crown and the people ; he con- 
ceived a system of decentralisation which should give 
the whole nation an interest in public affairs ; in his 
ecclesiastical views he was Ultramontane rather than 
Gallican. These ideas are put forth in his Direction pour 
la Conscience dun Roi and the Plan de Gouvernement. 



FENELON 



33 



Louis XIV. suspected the political tendency of Tele- 
viagzic, and caused the printing of the first edition to 
be suspended. Fenelon has sometimes been regarded 
as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement ; but 
he would rather, by ideas in which, as events proved, 
there may have been something chimerical, have ren- 
dered revolution impossible. 

Into his controversy with Bossuet he threw himself 
with a combative energy and a skill in defence and 
attack that surprise one who knows him only through 
his Lettres Spirituelles, which tend towards the efface- 
ment of the will in a union with God through love. 
Bossuet pleaded against the dangers for morals and for 
theology of a false mysticism ; Fenelon, against con- 
founding true mysticism with what is false. In his 
Traite de I' Existence de Dieu he shows himself a bold 
and subtle thinker : the first part, which is of a popular 
character, attempts to prove the existence of the Deity 
by the argument from design in nature and from the 
reason in man; the second part — of a later date — 
follows Descartes in metaphysical proofs derived from 
our idea of an infinite and a perfect being. To his 
other distinctions Fenelon added that of a literary critic, 
unsurpassed in his time, unless it be by Boileau. His 
Dialogues stir r Eloquence seek to replace the elaborate 
methods of logical address, crowded with divisions and 
subdivisions, and supported with a multitude of quota- 
tions, by a style simple, natural, and delicate in its 
fervency. 

The admirable Lettre a VAcademie, Fenelon's latest 
gift to literature, states the case of the ancients against 
the moderns, and of the moderns against the ancients, 
with an attempt at impartiality, but it is evident that the 



234 FRENCH LITERATURE 

writer's love was chiefly given to his favourite classical 
authors ; simplicity and natural beauty attracted him 
more than ingenuity or wit or laboured brilliance. He 
feared that the language was losing some of its richness 
and flexibility ; he condemns the use of rhyme ; he is 
hardly just to Racine, but honours himself by his ad- 
miration of Moliere. In dealing with historical writings 
he recognises the importance of the study of govern- 
ments, institutions, and social life, and at the same time 
values highly a personal, vivid, direct manner, and a 
feeling for all that is real, concrete, and living. To his 
rare gifts of intellect and of the soul was added an 
inexpressible personal charm, in which something that 
was almost feminine was united with the reserved power 
and authority of a man. 



CHAPTER VIII 

TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

THE spiritual life was interpreted from within by Fenelon. 
The facts of the moral world, as seen in society, were 
studied, analysed, and portrayed by La Bruyere and 
Saint-Simon. 

Jean de la Bruyere (1645-96), a Parisian of the 
bourgeoisie, appointed preceptor in history to the grand- 
son of the great Conde, saw with the keen eyes of 
a disenchanted observer the spectacle of seventeenth- 
century society. In 1688, appended to his translation 
of the Characters of Theophrastus, appeared his only 
important work, Les Caracteres ou les Mceurs de ce 
Siecle; revised and enlarged editions followed, until 
the ninth was published in 1696. " I restore to the 
public," he wrote, "what the public lent me." In a 
series of sixteen chapters, each consisting of detached 
paragraphs, his studies of human life and of the social 
environment are presented in the form of maxims, reflec- 
tions, observations, portraits. For the maxims a recent 
model lay before him in the little volume of La Roche- 
foucauld ; portraits, for which the romances of Mdlle. 
de Scudery had created a taste, had been exhibited in a 
collection formed by Mdlle. de Montpensier — the growth 
of her salon — in collaboration with Segrais {Divers Por- 
traits, 1659). Aware of his mastery as a painter of 



236 FRENCH LITERATURE 

character, La Bruyere added largely to the number of 
his portraits in the later editions. Keys, professing to 
identify his character-sketches with living persons, en- 
hanced the interest excited by the work ; but in many 
instances La Bruyere aims at presenting a type rather 
than an individual, a type which had been individualised 
by his observation of actual persons. 

A profound or an original thinker he was not. In- 
capable of employing base means to attain worldly suc- 
cess, his honourable failure left a cartain bitterness in 
his spirit ; he regarded the life around him as a looker- 
on, who enjoyed the spectacle, and enjoyed also to note 
the infirmities of those who took part in the game which 
he had declined. He is neither a determined pessimist, 
nor did he see realities through a roseate veil; he neither 
thinks basely of human nature nor in a heroic fashion : 
he studies its weakness with a view, he declares, to refor- 
mation, but actually, perhaps, more in the way of an 
observer than of a moral teacher. He is before all 
else a " naturalist," a naturalist with a sufficient field 
for investigation, though the life of the provinces and 
that of the fields (save in their more obvious aspect 
of mournful toil) lie beyond his sphere. The value of 
his criticisms of men and manners arises partly from 
the fact that he is not pledged to a system, that he 
can take up various points of view, and express the 
results of many moods of mind. Now he is severe, 
and again he is indulgent ; now he appears almost a 
cynic, and presently we find that his heart is tender ; 
now he is grave, and in a moment mirthful ; while 
for every purpose and in every mood he has irony at 
his command. He divines the working of the passions 
with a fine intelligence, and is a master in noting every 



LA BRUYERE 237 

outward betrayal or indication of the hidden processes 
of the heart. 

The successive chapters deal with the intellect and 
authorship, personal merit, women, the heart, society 
and conversation, the gifts of fortune, the town, the 
court, men in high station, the King and commonwealth, 
the nature of man, judgments and criticism, fashion, 
customs, the pulpit ; and under each head are grouped, 
without formal system, those notes on life and studies 
of society that had gradualiy accumulated in the author's 
mind. A final chapter, "Des Esprits Forts," expresses 
a vague spiritual philosophy, which probably was not 
insincere, and which at least served to commend the 
mundane portion of his book to pious readers. The 
special attraction of the whole lies in its variety. A 
volume merely of maxims would have been too rigid, 
too oracular for such a versatile spirit as that of La 
Bruyere. " Different things," he says, " are thought 
out by different methods, and explained by diverse 
expressions, it may be by a sentence, an argument, 
a metaphor or some other figure, a parallel, a simple 
comparison, a complete fact, a single feature, by 
description, or by portraiture." His book contains 
all these, and his style corresponds with the variety 
of matter and method — a style, as Voltaire justly 
characterises it, rapid, concise, nervous, picturesque. 
"Among all the different modes in which a single 
thought may be expressed," wrote La Bruyere, " only 
one is correct." To find this exact expression he 
sometimes over - labours his style, and searches the 
vocabulary too curiously for the most striking word. 
In his desire for animation the periodic structure of 
sentence yields to one of interruptions, suspensions, and 



238 FRENCH LITERATURE 

surprises. He is at once a moralist and a virtuoso in 
the literary art. 

The greater part of Saint-Simon's life and the com- 
position of his Memoires belong to the eighteenth cen- 
tury; but his mind was moulded during his early years, 
and retained its form and lineaments. He may be re- 
garded as a belated representative of the great age . of 
Louis XIV. If he belongs in some degree to the newer 
age by virtue of his sense that political reform was needed, 
his designs of political reform were derived from the 
past rather than pointed towards the future. Louis DE 
Rouvray, Due de Saint-Simon, was born at Versailles 
in 1675. He cherished the belief that his ancestry could 
be traced to Charlemagne. His father, a page of Louis 
XIII., had been named a duke and peer o> France in 
1635 ; from his father descended to the son a devotion 
to the memory of Louis XI 1 1., and a passionate attach- 
ment to the dignity of his own order. 

Saint-Simon's education was narrow, but he acquired 
some Latin, and was a diligent reader of French history. 
In 1 69 1 he was presented to the King and was enrolled 
as a soldier in the musketeers. He purchased by-and-by 
what we should now call the colonelcy of a cavalry regi- 
ment, but was ill-pleased with the system which had 
transformed a feudal army into one where birth and 
rank were subjected to official control ; and in 1702, 
when others received promotion and he was passed over, 
he sent in his resignation. Having made a fortunate 
and happy marriage, Saint-Simon was almost constantly 
at Versailles until the death of the King, and obtained 
the most intimate acquaintance with what he terms the 
mechanics of the court. He had many grievances against 
Louis XIV., chief among them the insult shown to the 



SAINT-SIMON 239 

nobility in the King's legitimatising his natural offspring; 
and he justly regarded Madame de Maintenon as his 
enemy. 

The death of the Due de Bourgogne, to whose party 
he belonged, was a blow to Saint-Simon's hopes; but the 
Regent remained his friend. He helped, on a diplomatic 
mission to Spain, to negotiate the marriage of Louis XV.; 
yet still was on fire with indignation caused by the wrongs 
of the dukes and peers, whom he regarded as entitled 
on historical grounds to form the great council of 
the monarchy, and almost as rightful partners in the 
supreme power. His political life closed in 1723 with 
the death of the Regent. He lived in retirement at his 
chateau of La Ferte-Vidame, sorrowfully surviving his 
wife and his sons. In Paris, at the age of eighty (1755), 
Saint-Simon died. 

When nineteen years old, reading Bassompierre's 
Memoires in a soldier's hour of leisure, he conceived 
the idea of recording his own experiences, and the 
Memoires of Saint- Simon were begun. During later 
years, in the camp or at the court, notes accumulated 
in his hands, but the definitive form which they took 
was not determined until, in his retirement at La Ferte- 
Vidame, the Journal of Dangeau came into his hands. 
Dangeau's Journal is dry, colourless, passionless, without 
insight and without art ; but it is a well-informed and 
an exact chronicle, extending over the years from 1684 
to 1720. Saint-Simon found it "d'une fadeur a faired 
vomir " ; its servility towards the King and Madame de 
Maintenon enraged him ; but it exhibited facts in an 
orderly sequence ; it might serve as a guide and a clue 
among his own reminiscences ; on the basis of Dangeau's 
literal transcript of occurrences he might weave his own 



240 FRENCH LITERATURE 

brilliant recitals and passionate presentations of charac- 
ter. Thus Saint-Simon's Memoires came to be written. 

He himself saw much, and his eye had a demonic 
power of observation ; nothing escaped his vision, and 
his passions enabled him to penetrate through what he 
saw to its secret meanings. He had gathered informa- 
tion from those who knew the mysteries of the palace 
and the court ; great persons, court ladies, even valets 
and waiting-women, had been sought and searched to 
satisfy his insatiable curiosity. It is true that the pas- 
sions which often lit up the truth sometimes obscured it; 
any gossip discreditable to those whom he hated was 
welcome to him ; he confesses that he did not pique 
himself on his impartiality, and it is certain that he did 
not always verify details. Nevertheless he did not con- 
sciously falsify facts ; he had a sense of the honour of 
a gentleman ; his spirit was serious, and his feeling of 
duty and of religion was sincere. Without h's im- 
petuosity, his violence, his exaggerations, we might not 
have had his vividness, like that of life itself, his incom- 
parable portraits, more often inspired by hatred than 
by love, his minuteness and his breadth of style, the 
phrases which ineffaceably brand his victims, the lyrical 
outcry of triumph over enemies of his order. His 
style is the large style of seventeenth -century prose, 
but alive with words that sparkle and gleam, words 
sometimes created by himself to express the intensity 
of his imagination. 

The Memoires, the final preparation of which was the 
work of his elder years, cover the period from 1691 to 
1723. His manuscripts were bequeathed to his cousin, 
the Bishop of Metz ; a lawsuit arose with Saint-Simon's 
creditors, and in the end the papers were buried among 



ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 241 

the public archives. Considerable fragments saw the 
light before the close of the eighteenth century, but it 
was not until 1829-31 that a true editio princeps, sub- 
stantially correct, was published. The violences and 
irregularities of Saint-Simon's style offered no obstacle 
to the admiration of readers at a time when the 
romantic movement was dominant. He was hailed as 
the Tacitus of French history, and had his manner 
something more of habitual concentration the com- 
parison would not be unjust. 

The eighteenth century may be said to have begun 
before the year 1701 with the quarrel of the Ancients 
3nd the Moderns. If we can speak of any one idea as 
dominant during the age of the philosophers, it is the 
idea of human progress. Through an academic dis- 
putation that idea emerged to the light. At first a 
religious question was complicated with a question re- 
lating to art ; afterwards the religious question was 
replaced by one of philosophy. As early as 1657, 
Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, turned pietist after a youth 
of licence, maintained in theory, as well as by the ex- 
amples of his unreadable epic poems, that Christian 
heroism and Christian faith afforded material for ima- 
ginative handling more suitable to a Christian poet than 
the history and fables of antiquity. Boileau, in the 
third chant of his Art Poetiqtie, replied — the mysteries 
of the Christian faith are too solemn, too awful, to be 
tricked out to gratify the fancy. 

Desmarets dying, bequeathed his contention to Charles 
PERRAULT (1628-1703), who had burlesqued the JEncid, 
written light and fragile pieces of verse, and occupied 
himself as a dilettante in patristic and historical studies. 
In i6 Q 7, after various skirmishes between partisans on 



242 FRENCH LITERATURE 

either side, the quarrel assumed a new importance. The 
King had recovered after a painful operation ; it was a 
moment for gratulation. Perrault, at a sitting of the 
Academy, read his poem Le Siecle de Louis le Grand, 
in which the revolt against the classical tyranny was 
formulated, and contemporary authors were glorified at 
the expense of the poets of antiquity. Boileau mur- 
mured, indignant ; Racine offered ironical commenda- 
tions ; other Academicians patriotically applauded their 
own praises. Light-feathered epigrams sped to and fro. 

Fontenelle, in his Discours sur F&glogue and a Digres- 
sion sur les Anciens et les Modernes, widened the field 
of debate. Were trees in ancient days taller than those 
in our own fields ? If not, why may not modern men 
equal Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes ? " Nothing 
checks the progress of things, nothing confines the 
intelligence so much as admiration of the ancients." 
Genius is bestowed by Nature on every age, but know- 
ledge grows from generation to generation. In his dia- 
logues entitled the Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes 
(1688-97), Perrault maintained that in art, in science, 
in literature, the law of the human mind is a law of 
progress ; that we are the true ancients of the earth, 
wise with inherited science, more exact in reasoning, 
more refined in psychological distinctions, raised to a 
higher plane by Christianity, by the invention of print- 
ing, and by the favour of a great monarch. La Fontaine 
in his charming Epitre to Huet, La Bruyere in his 
Caracteres, Boileau in his ill - tempered Reflexions sur 
Longin, rallied the supporters of classicism. Gradually 
the fires smouldered or were assuaged ; Boileau and 
Perrault were reconciled. 

Perrault, if he did not honour antiquity in classical 



ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 243 

forms, paid a homage to popular tradition in his de- 
lightful Contcs de ma Mere POie (if, indeed, the tales be 
his), which have been a joy to generations of children. 
With inferior art, Madame d'Aulnoy added to the golden 
treasury for the young. When, fifteen or twenty years 
after the earlier war, a new campaign began between 
the Ancients and the Moderns, the philosophical dis- 
cussion of the idea of progress had separated itself 
from the literary quarrel. But in the tiltings of Lamotte- 
Houdart, the champion of the moderns, against a well- 
equipped female knight, the learned Madame Dacier — ■ 
indignant at Lamotte's Iliade, recast in the eighteenth- 
century taste — a new question was raised, and one of 
significance for the eighteenth century — that of the 
relative merits of prose and verse. 

Lamotte, a writer of comedy, tragedy, opera, fables, 
eclogues, odes, maintained that the highest literary form 
is prose, and he versified none the less. The age was 
indeed an age of prose — an age when the salons dis- 
cussed the latest discovery in science, the latest doctrine 
in philosophy or politics. Its imaginative enthusiasm 
passed over from art to speculation, and what may be 
called the poetry of the eighteenth century is to be 
found less in its odes or dramas or elegies than in the 
hopes and visions which gathered about that idea of 
human progress emerging from a literary discussion, 
idle, perhaps, in appearance, but in its inner significance 
no unfitting inauguration of an era which looked to the 
future rather than to the past. 

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757), 
a son of Corneille's sister, whose intervention in the 
quarrel of Ancients and Moderns turned the discussion 
in the direction of philosophy, belongs to both the 



244 FRENCH LITERATURE 

seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the hun- 
dred years which made up his life, there was indeed 
time for a second Fontenelle to develop from the first. 
The first Fontenelle, satirised as the Cydias of La 
Bruyere, " un compose du pedant et du precieux," was 
an aspirant poet, without vision, without passion, who 
tried to compensate his deficiencies by artificial elegances 
of style. The origin of hissing is maliciously dated by 
Racine from his tragedy Aspar. His operas fluttered 
before they fell ; his Eglognes had not life enough to 
flutter. The Dialogues des Mart's (1683) is a young 
writer's effort to be clever by paradox, an effort to show 
his wit by incongruous juxtapositions, and a cynical 
levelling of great reputations. But there was another 
Fontenelle, the untrammelled disciple of Descartes, a 
man of universal interests, passionless, but curious for 
all knowledge, an assimilator of new ideas, a dissolver 
of old beliefs, an intermediary between science and the 
world of fashion, a discreet insinuator of doubts, who 
smiled but never condescended to laugh, an intelligence 
supple, subtle, and untiring. 

In 1686 he published his Entretiens sur la Pluralite des 
Moudes, evening conversations between an astronomer 
and a marchioness, half-scientific, half-gallant, learned 
coquetries with science, for which he asked no more 
serious attention than a novel might require, while he 
communicated the theories of Descartes and the dis- 
coveries of Galileo, suggested that science is our safest 
way to truth, and that truth at best is not absolute but 
relative to the human understanding. The Histoire des 
Oracles, in which the cargo of Dutch erudition that 
loaded his original by Van Dale is skilfully lightened, 
glided to the edge of theological storm. Fontenelle 



FONTENELLE 245 

would show that the pagan oracles were not delivered 
by demons, and did not cease at the coming of Jesus 
Christ ; innocent opinions, but apt to illustrate the 
origins and growth of superstitions, from which we too 
may not be wholly free in spite of all our advantages of 
true religion and sound philosophy. Of course God's 
chosen people are not like unguided Greeks or Romans ; 
and yet human beings are much the same in all times 
and places. The Jesuit Baltus scented heresy, and 
Fontenelle was very ready to admit that the devil was 
a prophet, since Father Baltus wished it so to be, and 
held the opinion to be orthodox. 

Appointed perpetual secretary of the Academic dcs 
Sciences in 1 697, Fontenelle pronounced during forty 
years the panegyrics of those who had been its mem- 
bers. These Eloges des Academiciens are masterpieces 
in a difficult art, luminous, dignified, generous without 
ostentation, plain without poverty of thought or expres- 
sion. The discreet Fontenelle loved tranquillity — " If I 
had my hand full of truths, I should take good care before 
I opened it." He never lost a friend, acting on two 
prudent maxims, " Everything is possible," and " Every 
one is right." " It is not a heart," said Madame de 
Tencin, " which you have in your breast ; it is a brain." 
It was a kindly brain, which could be for a moment 
courageous. And thus it was possible for him to enter 
his hundredth year, still interested in ideas, still tranquil 
and alert. 

A great arsenal for the uses of eighteenth -century 
philosophy was constructed and stored by Pierre Bayle 
( 1 647-1706) in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, of 
which the first edition was published in 1697. Science, 
which found its popular interpreter in Fontenelle, was 



246 FRENCH LITERATURE 

a region hardly entered by Bayle ; the general history 
of Europe, from the close of the mediaeval period, and 
especially the records in every age of mythologies, reli- 
gions, theologies, philosophies, formed his province, and 
it was one of wide extent. Born in 1647, son of a Pro- 
testant pastor, educated by Jesuits, converted by them 
and reconverted, professor of philosophy at Sedan, a 
fugitive to Rotterdam, professor there of history and 
philosophy, deprived of his position for unorthodox 
opinions, Bayle found rest not in cessation from toil, 
but in the research of a sceptical scholar, peaceably 
and endlessly pursued. 

His early zeal of proselytism languished and expired. 
In its place came a boundless curiosity, a penetrating 
sagacity. His vast accumulations of knowledge were 
like those of the students of the Renaissance. The tend- 
encies of his intellect anticipate the tendencies of the 
eighteenth century, but with him scepticism had not 
become ambitious or dogmatic. He followed tranquilly 
where reason and research led, and saw no cause why 
religion and morals more than any other subjects should 
not be submitted to the scrutiny of rational inquiry. 
Since men have held all beliefs, and are more prone 
to error than apt to find the truth, why should any 
opinions be held sacred ? Let us ascertain and expose 
the facts. In doing so, we shall learn the lesson of uni- 
versal tolerance ; and if the principle of authority in 
matters of religion be gently sapped, can this be con- 
sidered an evil ? Morals, which have their foundation in 
the human understanding, remain, though all theologies 
may be in doubt. If the idea of Providence be a super- 
stition, why should not man guide his life by good sense 
and moderation ? Bayle did not attack existing beliefs 



PIERRE BAYLE 247 

with the battering-ram : he quietly removed a stone here 
and a stone there from the foundations. If he is aggres- 
sive, it is by means of a tranquil irony. The errors of 
human-kind are full of curious interest ; the disputes 
of theologians are both curious and amusing ; the moral 
licences of men and women are singular and often 
diverting. Why not instruct and entertain our minds 
with the facts of the world ? 

The instruction is delivered by Bayle in the dense and 
sometimes heavy columns of his text ; the entertainment 
will be found in the rambling gossip, interspersed with 
illuminating ideas, of his notes. Almost every eminent 
writer of the eighteenth century was a debtor to Bayle's 
Dictionary. He kept his contemporaries informed of all 
that was added to knowledge in his periodical publica- 
tion, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres (begun in 1684). 
He called himself a cloud-compeller : " My gift is to 
create doubts ; but they are no more than doubts." 
Yet there is light, if not warmth, in such a genius for 
criticism as his ; and it was light not only for France, 
but for Europe. 



BOOK THE FOURTH 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



BOOK THE FOURTH 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

CHAPTER I 

MEMOIRS AND HISTORY— POETRY— THE 
THEATRE— THE NOVEL 

I 

THE literature of the second half of the seventeenth 
century was monarchical, Christian, classical. The 
eighteenth century was to lose the spirit of classical 
art while retaining many of its forms, to overthrow the 
domination of the Church, to destroy the monarchy. 
It was an age not of great art but of militant ideas, 
which more and more came to utilise art as their 
vehicle. Political speculation, criticism, science, sceptical 
philosophy invaded literature. The influence of Eng- 
land — of English free-thinkers, political writers, men 
of science, essayists, novelists, poets — replaced the in- 
fluence of Italy and Spain, and for long that of the 
models of ancient Greece and Rome. The century of 
the philosophers was eminently social and mundane ; 
the salons revived ; a new preciosity came into fashion ; 
but as time went on the salons became rather the mart 



252 FRENCH LITERATURE 

of ideas philosophical and scientific than of the dainti- 
nesses of letters and of art. Journalism developed, and 
thought tended to action, applied itself directly to public 
life. While the work of destructive criticism proceeded, 
the bases of a moral reconstruction were laid ; the free 
play of intellect was succeeded by a great enfranchise- 
ment of the passions ; the work of Voltaire was followed 
by the work of Rousseau. 

Before the close of the reign of Louis XIV. the old 
order of things had suffered a decline. War, famine, 
public debt, oppressive taxation had discredited the 
monarchy. A dull hypocrisy hardly disguised the gross 
licentiousness of the times. The revocation of the edict 
of Nantes had exiled those Protestants who formed a 
substantial part of the moral conscience of France. The 
bitter feud of brother-bishops, Bossuet and Fenelon, 
hurling defiance against each other for the love of God, 
had made religion a theme for mockery. Pert-Royal, 
once the refuge of serious faith and strict morals, was 
destroyed. The bull Unigenitus expelled the spiritual 
element from French Christianity, reduced the clergy 
to a state of intellectual impotence, and made a lasting 
breach between them and the better part of the laity. 
Meanwhile the scientific movement had been proving 
its power. Science had come to fill the place left void 
by religion. The period of the Regency (1715-23) is 
one of transition from the past to the newer age, 
shameless in morals, degraded in art ; the period of 
Voltaire followed, when intellect sapped and mined the 
old beliefs ; with Rousseau came the explosion of senti- 
ment and an effort towards reconstruction. A great 
political and social revolution closed the century. 

The life of the time is seen in many memoirs, and in 



MEMOIRS AND LETTERS 253 

the correspondence of many distinguished persons, both 
men and women. Among the former the Mdmoires of 
Mdlle. Delaunay, afterwards Mme. de Staal (1684-1750) 
are remarkable for the vein of melancholy, subdued by 
irony, underlying a style which is formed for fine and clear 
exactness. The Duchesse du Maine's lady-in-waiting, 
daughter of a poor painter, but educated with care, drew 
delicately in her literary art with an etcher's tool, and 
her hand was controlled by a spirit which had in it 
something of the Stoic. The Souvenirs of Mme. de 
Caylus (1673-1729), niece of Mme. de Maintenon — ■ 
"jamais de creature plus seduisante," says Saint-Simon 
— give pictures of the court, charming in their naivete, 
grace, and mirth. Mme. d'Epinay, designing to tell the 
story of her own life, disguised as a piece of fiction, 
became in her Memoires the chronicler of the manners 
of her time. The society of the salons and the men of 
letters is depicted in the Memoirs of Marmontel. These 
are but examples from an abundant literature constantly 
augmented to the days of Mme. de Campan and Mme. 
Roland. The general aspect of the social world in the 
mid-century is presented by the historian Duclos (1704- 
1772) in his Considerations snr les Mceurs de ce Siecle, and 
with reparation for his previous neglect of the part 
played in society by women in his Mdmoires pour servir 
a I'H.stoire du XVIII e Siecle. 

As much or more may be learnt from the letter- 
writers as from the writers of memoirs. If Voltaire 
did not take the first place by his correspondence, 
so vast, so luminous, so comprehensive, it might justly 
be assigned to his friend Mme. du Deffand (1697- 
1780), whose lucid intelligence perceived everything, 
whose disabused heart seemed detached until old age 



254 FRENCH LITERATURE 

from all that most interested her understanding. For 
clear good sense we turn to the Marquise de Lambert, 
for bourgeois worth and kindliness to Mme. Geoff rin, 
for passion which kindles the page to Mdlle. de Lespi- 
nasse, for sensibility and romance ripening to political 
ardour and strenuous convictions to Mme. Roland. 
Among the philosophers Diderot pours the- torrent, 
clear or turbid, of his genius into his correspondence 
with affluent improvisation ; DAlembert is grave, tem- 
perate, lucid ; the Abbe Galiani, the little Machiavel — " a 
pantomime from head to foot," said Diderot — the gay- 
Neapolitan punchinello, given the freedom of Paris, 
that " capital of curiosity," is at once wit, cynic, thinker, 
scholar, and buffoon. These, again, are but examples 
from an epistolary swarm. * 

While the eighteenth century thus mirrored itself in 
memoirs and letters, it did not forget the life of past 
centuries. The studious Benedictines, who had already 
accomplished much, continued their erudite labours. 
Nicolas Freret (1688-1749), taking all antiquity for his 
province, illuminated the study of chronology, geogra- 
phy, sciences, arts, language, religion. Daniel and Velly 
narrated the history of France. Vertot (1655-1735), with 
litile of the spirit of historical fidelity, displayed certain 
gifts of an historical artist. The school of scepticism 
was represented by the Jesuit Hardouin, who doubted 
the authenticity of all records of the past except those 
of his own numismatic treasures. Questions as to the 
principles of historical certitude occupied the Academy 
of Inscriptions during many sittings from 1720 onwards, 
and produced a body of important studies. While the 
Physiocrats were endeavouring to demonstrate that 
there is a natural order in social circumstances, a philo- 



PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 255 

sophy of history, which bound the ages together, was 
developed in the writings of Montesquieu and Turgot, 
if not of Voltaire. The Esprit des Lois, the Essai sur les 
Moeurs, and Turgot's discourses, delivered in 1750 at the 
Sorbonne, contributed in different degrees and ways 
towards a new and profounder conception of the life of 
societies or of humanity. By Turgot for the first time 
the idea of progress was accepted as the ruling principle 
of history. It cannot be denied that, as regards the 
sciences of inorganic nature, he more than foreshadowed 
Comte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysi- 
cal, and positive, through which the mind of humanity is 
alleged to have travelled. 

Yin the second half of the century, history tended to 
become doctrinaire, aggressive, declamatory — a pamphlet 
in the form of treatise or narrative. Morelly wrote in 
the interest of socialistic ideas, which correspond to 
those of modern collectivism. Mably, inspired at first 
by enthusiasm for the ancient republics, advanced to a 
communistic creed. Condorcet, as the century drew 
towards a close, bringing together the ideas of econo- 
mists and historians, traced human progress through the 
past, and uttered ardent prophecies of human perfecti- 
bility in the future. 

II 

Poetry other than dramatic grew in the eighteenth 
century upon a shallow soil. The more serious and the 
more ardent mind of the time was occupied with science, 
the study of nature, the study of society, philosophical 
speculation, the criticism of religion, of government, and 
of social arrangements. The old basis of belief upon 



256 FRENCH LITERATURE 

which reposed the great art of the preceding century had 
given way. The analytic intellect distrusted the imagina- 
tion. The conventions of a brilliant society were un- 
favourable to the contemplative mood of high poetry. 
The tyranny of the " rules '.' remained when the enthu- 
siasm which found guidance and a safeguard in the rules 
had departed. The language itself had lost in richness, 
variety, harmony, and colour ; it was an admirable in- 
strument for the intellect, but was less apt to render 
sensations and passions ;7when employed for the loftier 
purposes of art it tended to the oratorical, with something 
of over-emphasis and strain. The contention of La 
Motte-Houdart that verse denaturalises and deforms ideas, 
expresses the faith of the time, and La Motte's own cold 
and laboured odes did not tend to refute his theory. 

Chaulieu (1639-1720), the " poete de la bonne com- 
pagnie," an anacreontic senior, patriarch of pleasure, sur- 
vived the classical century, and sang his songs of facile, 
epicurean delights ; his friend La Fare (1644-1712) sur- 
vived, but slept and ate more than a songster should. 
Anthony Hamilton (1646?-! 720) wrote graceful verses, 
and in his brilliant Memoires de la Vie du Comte de 
Gramont became the historian of the amorous intrigues 
of the court of Charles II. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau 
(1670-1741), who in the days of Mme. de Maintenon's 
authority had in his sacred Cantates been pious by com- 
mand, recompensed himself by retailing unbecoming 
epigrams — and for epigram he had a genuine gift — to 
the Society of the Temple. He manufactured odes with 
skill in the mechanism of verse, and carefully secured the 
fine disorder required in that form of art by factitious 
enthusiasm and the abuse of mythology and allegory. 
When Rousseau died, Lefranc de Pompignan mourned 



DESCRIPTIVE POETRY 257 

for "le premier chantre du monde," reborn as the Orpheus 
of France, in a poem which alone of Lefranc's numerous 
productions — and by virtue of two stanzas — has not that 
sanctity ascribed to them by Voltaire, the sanctity which 
forbids any one to touch them. Why name their fellows 
and successors in the eighteenth-century art of writing 
poems without poetry ? 

Louis Racine (1692-1763), son of the author of Athalic, 
|n his versified discourses on La Grace and La Religion 
was devout and edifying, but with an edification which 
promotes slumber. If a poet in sympathy with the 
philosophers desired to edify, he described the pheno- 
mena of nature as Saint- Lambert (1716-1803) did in 
his Saisons — " the only work of our century," Voltaire 
assured the author, "which will reach posterity." To 
describe meant to draw out the inventory of nature's 
charms with an eye not on the object but on the page 
of the Encyclopaedia, and to avoid the indecency of 
naming anything in direct and simple speech. The 
Seasons of Saint-Lambert were followed by the Months 
(Alois) of Roucher (1745-94) — "the most beautiful poetic 
shipwreck of the century," said the malicious Rivarol 
— and by the Jardins of Delille (1738-1813). When 
Delille translated the Georgics he was saluted by Voltaire 
as the Abbe Virgil. 1 The salons heard him with rapture 
recite his verses as from the tripod of inspiration. He 
was the favourite of Marie-Antoinette. Aged and blind, 
he was a third with Homer and Milton. In death they 
crowned his forehead, and for three days the mourning 
crowd gazed on all that remained of their great poet. 
And yet Delille's Jardins is no better than a patchwork 
of carpet-gardening, in which the flowers are theatrical 

1 Or was this Rivarol's ironical jest ? 



258 FRENCH LITERATURE 

paper-flowers. If anything lives from the descriptive 
poetry of the eighteenth century, it is a few detached 
lines from the writings of Lemierre. 

The successor of J.-B. Rousseau in the grand ode was 
Ecouchard Lebrun (1729-1807), rival of Pindar. All he 
wanted to equal Pindar was some forgetfulness of self, 
some warmth, some genuine enthusiasm, some harmony, 
a touch of genius ; a certain dignity of imagination he 
exhibits in his best moments. If we say that he honoured 
Buffon and was the friend of Andre Chenier, we have 
said in his praise that which gives him the highest dis- 
tinction ; yet it may be added that if he often falsified 
the ode, he, like Rousseau, excelled in epigram. It was 
not the great lyric but le petit lyrisme which blossomed 
and ran to seed in the thin poetic soil. The singers of 
fragile loves and trivial pleasures are often charming, and 
as often they are merely frivolous or merely depraved. 
Grecourt ; Piron ; Bernard, the curled and powdered 
Anacreon ; Bernis, Voltaire's "Babet la Bouquetiere," 
King Frederick's poet of- "sterile abundance"; Dorat, 
who could flutter at times with an airy grace ; Bertin, 
born in the tropics, and with the heat of the senses in 
his verse ; Parny, an estray in Paris from the palms and 
fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the "dear Tibullus" of 
Voltaire — what a swarm of butterflies, soiled or shining ! 

If two or three poets deserve to be distinguished from 
the rest, one is surely Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset 
(1709-77), whose parrot Vert-Vert } instructed by the 
pious Sisters, demoralised by the boatmen of the Loire, 
still edifies and scandalises the lover of happy badinage 
in verse ; one is the young and unfortunate Nicolas- 
Joseph- Laurent Gilbert (1751-80), less unfortunate 
and less gifted than the legend makes him, yet luckless 



TRAGEDY AFTER RACINE 259 

enough and embittered enough to become the satirist 
of Academicians and philosophers and the society which 
had scorned his muse; and the third is Jean-Pierre 
Claris de Florian (1755-94), the amiable fabulist, 
who, lacking La Fontaine's lyric genius, fine harmonies, 
and penetrating good sense, yet can tell a story with 
pleasant ease, and draw a moral with gentle propriety. 

In every poetic form, except comedy, that he attempted, 
Voltaire stands high among his contemporaries ; they 
give us a measure of his range and excellence. But 
the two greatest poets of the eighteenth century wrote 
in prose. Its philosophical poet was the naturalist 
Buffon ; its supreme lyrist was the author of La Nouvelle 
Heloise. 



Ill 

In the history of French tragedy only one name of 
importance — that of Crebillon — is to be found in the 
interval between Racine and Voltaire. Campistron 
feebly, Danchet formally and awkwardly, imitated 
Racine ; Duche followed him in sacred tragedy ; La 
Grange -Chancel (author of the Philippiques, directed, 
against the Regent) followed him in tragedies on classical 
subjects. If any piece deserves to be distinguished 
above the rest, it is the Manlius (1698) of La Fosse, a 
work — suggestive rather of Corneille than of Racine — 
which was founded on the Venice Preserved of Otway. 
The art of Racine languished in inferior hands. The 
eighteenth century, while preserving its form, thought 
to reanimate it by the provocatives of scenic decoration 
and more rapid and more convulsive action. 

Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon (1674-1762), a diligent 



260 FRENCH LITERATURE 

reader of seventeenth-century romances, transported the 
devices of romance, its horrors, its pathetic incidents, its 
disguises, its surprises, its discoveries, into the theatre, 
and substituted a tragedy of violent situations for the 
tragedy of character. His Rhadamiste et Zenobie (171 1), 
which has an air of Corneillean grandeur and heroism, 
notwithstanding a plot so complicated that it is difficult 
to follow, was received with unmeasured enthusiasm. To 
be atrocious within the rules was to create a new and 
thrilling sensation. Torrents of tears flowed for the 
unhappy heroine of La Motte's Inks de Castro (1723), 
secretly married to the Prince of Portugal, and pardoned 
only when the fatal poison is in her veins. Voltaire's 
effort to renovate classical tragedy was that of a writer 
who loved ihe theatre, first for its own sake, afterwards 
as an instrument for influencing public opinion, who 
conceived tragedy aright as the presentation of character 
and passion seen in action. His art suffered from his 
extreme facility, from his inability (except it be in Zaire) 
to attain dramatic self-detachment, from the desire to 
conquer his spectators in the readiest ways, by striking 
situations, or, at a later date, by the rhetoric of philo- 
sophical doctrine and sentiment. 

There is no one, with all his faults, to set beside 
Voltaire. Piron and Gresset are remembered, not by 
their tragedies, but each by a single comedy. Mar- 
montel's Memoirs live ; his tales have a faded glory ; as 
for his tragedies, the ingenious stage asp which hissed 
as the curtain fell on his Cleopdtre, was a sound critic of 
their mediocrity. Lemierre, with some theatrical talent, 
wrote ill ; as the love of spectacle grew, he permitted 
his William Tell to shoot the apple, and his widow of 
Malabar to die in flames upon the stage. 






DUCIS AND SHAKESPEARE 261 

Saurin in Spartacus (1760) declaimed and dissertated 
in the manner of Voltaire. De Belloy at a lucky 
moment showed, in his Siege de Calais (1765), that rhe- 
torical patriotism had survived the Seven Years' War ; 
he was supposed to have founded that national, historic 
drama which the President Henault had projected ; but 
with the Siege de Calais the national drama rose and 
fell. Laharpe (1739-1803) was the latest writer who 
compounded classical tragedy according to the approved 
recipe. In the last quarter of the century Shakespeare 
became known to the French public through the transla- 
tion of Letourneur. Before that translation began to 
appear, Jean-Francois Ducis (1733-1816), the patron 
of whose imagination was his " Saint Guillaume " of 
Stratford, though he knew no English, had in a fashion 
presented Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet to his 
countrymen ; King Lear, Macbeth, King John, Othello 
(1792) followed. But Ducis came a generation too 
soon for a true Shakespearian rendering ; simple and 
heroic in his character as a man, he belonged to an 
age of philosophers and sentimentalists, an age of 
"virtue" and "nature." Shakespeare's translation is 
as strange as that of his own Bottom. Ophelia is the 
daughter of King Claudius ; the Queen dies by her own 
hand ; old Montague is a Montague-Ugolino who has 
devoured his sons ; Malcolm is believed to be a 
mountaineer's child ; Lear is borne on the stage, sleep- 
ing on a bed of roses, that he may beheld a sunrise ; 
Hedelmone (Desdemona) is no longer Othello's wife ; 
lago disappears ; Desdemona's handkerchief is not 
among the properties ; and Juliet's lark is voiceless. 
Eighteenth-century tragedy is indeed a city of tombs. 

Comedy made some amends. Before the appearance 



262 FRENCH LITERATURE 

of Regnard, the actor Baron, Moliere's favourite pupil, 
had given a lively play — V Homme a bonne Fortune (1686). 
Jean-Francois Regnard (1655-1709) escaped from his 
corsair captors and slavery at Algiers, made his sorry 
company of knaves and fools acceptable by virtue of 
inexhaustible gaiety, bright fantasy, and the liveliest 
of comic styles. His Joueur (1696) is a scapegrace, 
possessed by the passion of gaming, whose love of 
Angelique is a devotion to her dowry, but he will con- 
sole himself for lost love by another throw of the dice. 
His Legataire Universe!, greedy, old, and ailing, is sur- 
rounded by pitiless rogues, yet the curtain falls on a 
general reconciliation. Regnard's morals may be doubt- 
ful, but his mirth is unquestionable. 

Dancourt (1661-1725), with a far less happy style, had 
a truer power of observation, and as quick an instinct 
for theatrical effects ; he exhibits in the Chevalier a la 
Mode and the Bourgeoises a la Mode, if not with exact 
fidelity, at least in telling caricature, the struggle of 
classes in the society around him, wealth ambitious for 
rank, rank prepared to sell itself for wealth. The same 
spirit of cynical gaiety inspires the Double Veuvage of 
Charles Riviere Dufresny (1655 1-\'-]2^), where husband 
and wife, each disappointed in false tidings of the other's 
death, exhibit transports of feigned joy on meeting, and 
assist in the marriage of their respective lovers, each to 
accomplish the vexation of the other. Among such 
plays as these the Turcaret (1709) of Lesage appears as 
the creation of a type, and a type which verifies itself 
as drawn with a realism powerful and unfaltering. 

In striking contrast with Lesage's bold and bitter satire 
are the comedies of Marivaux, delicate indeed in observa- 
tion of life and character, skilled in their exploration of 



EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COMEDY 263 

the byways of the heart, brilliant in fantasy, subtle in 
sentiment, lightly touched by the sensuality of the day. 
Philippe Nericault Destouches (1680-1754) had the am- 
bition to revive the comedy of character, and by its 
means to read moral lessons on the stage ; unfortunately 
what he lacked was comic power. In his most cele- 
brated piece, Le Glorieux, he returns to the theme 
treated by Dancourt of the struggle between the ruined 
noblesse and the aspiring middle class. Pathos and 
something of romance are added to comedy. 

Already those tendencies which were to produce the 
so-called comedie larmoyante were at work. Piron 
(1689- 1773), who regarded it with hostility, unde- 
signedly assisted in its creation ; Les Fils Ingrats, named 
afterwards L'Ecole des Peres, given in 1728, the story 
of a too generous father of ungrateful children, a play 
designed for mirth, was in fact fitter to draw tears than 
to excite laughter. Piron's special gift, however, was 
for satire. In La Metromanie he smiles at the folly of 
the aspirant poet with all his cherished illusions ; yet 
young Damis with his folly, the innocent error of a 
generous spirit, wins a sympathy to which the duller 
representatives of good sense can make no claim. It 
is satire also which gives whatever comic force it pos- 
sesses to the one comedy of Gresset that is not forgotten : 
Le Mechant (1747), a disloyal comrade, would steal the 
heart of his friend's beloved ; soubrette and valet con- 
spire to expose the traitor ; but CI eon, who loves mis- 
chief in the spirit of sport, though unmasked, is little 
disconcerted. Brilliant in lines and speeches, Le Mechant 
is defective in its composition as a whole. 

The decline in a feeling for composition, for art, for the 
severity of outline, was accompanied by a development of 



264 FRENCH LITERATURE 

the emotional or sentimental element in drama. As sen- 
sibility was quickened, and wealth and ease increased, 
little things came to be felt as important. The middle 
class advanced in prosperity and power. Why should 
emperors and kings, queens and princesses occupy the 
stage? Why neglect the joys and griefs of every-day 
domestic life? If "nature" and "virtue" were to be 
honoured, why not seek them here ? Man, the new 
philosophy taught, is essentially good ; human nature 
is of itself inclined to virtue ; if it strays through 
force of circumstance into vice or folly, should not 
its errors be viewed with sympathy, with tenderness ? 
Thus comedy grew serious, and tragedy put off its 
exalted airs ; the genius of tragedy and the genius of 
comedy were wedded, and the come'die larmoyante, which 
might be named more correctly the bourgeois drama, 
was born of this union. 

In the plays of Nivelle de la ChausEe (1692-1754) 
the new type is already formed. The relations of wife 
and husband, of father and child, form the theme of 
all his plays. In Melanide, father and son, unrecognised, 
are rivals in love ; the wife and mother, supposed to 
be dead, is discovered ; the husband returns to her 
arms, and is reconciled to his son. It is the victory 
of nature and of innate goodness ; comic intention and 
comic power are wholly absent. La Chausee's morals are 
those of an optimist ; but those modern domestic tragedies, 
the ethics of which do not err by over-sanguine views 
of human nature, may trace their ancestry to Melanide. 

■ For such serious comedy or bourgeois drama the 
appropriate vehicle, so Diderot maintained, is grose. 
Diderot, among his many gifts, did not possess a talent 
for dramatic writing. But as a critic his influence was 



THE COMEDIE LARMOYANTE 265 

considerable. Midway between tragedy and comedy 
he perceived a place for the serious drama; to right 
and left, on either side of the centre, were spaces for 
forms approximating, the one to tragedy, the other to 
comedy. The hybrid species of tragi-comedy he wholly 
condemned ; each genre, as he conceived it, is a unity 
containing its own principle of life. The function of 
the theatre is less to represent character fully formed 
than to study the natural history of character, to exhibit 
the environments which determine character. Its pur- 
pose is to moralise life, and the chief means of morali- 
sation is that effusive sensibility which is the outflow 
of the inherent goodness of human nature. 

Diderot attempted to justify his theory by examples, 
and only proved his own incapacity as a writer for the 
stage. His friend Sedaine (1719-97) was more fortunate. 
Of the bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century, Le 
Philosophe sans le savoir alone survives. It is little more 
than a domestic anecdote rendered dramatic, but it has 
life and reality. The merchant Vanderk's daughter is 
to be married ; but on the same day his son, resenting 
an insult to his father, must expose his life in a duel. 
Old Antoine, the intendant, would take his young master's 
place of danger ; Antoine's daughter, Victorine, half- 
unawares has given her heart to the gallant duellist. 
Hopes and fears, joy and grief contend in the Vanderk 
habitation. Sedaine made a true capture of a little pro- 
vince of nature. When Mercier (1740-1814) tried to 
write in the same vein, his " nature " was that of de- 
clamatory sentiment imposed upon trivial incidents. 
Beaumarchais, in his earlier pieces, was tearful and 
romantic ; happily he repented him of his lugubrious 
sentiment, and restored to France its old gaiety in the 



266 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Barbier de Seville and the inimitable Mariage de Figaro ; 
but amid the mirth of Figaro can be heard the detona- 
tion of approaching revolutionary conflict. 



IV 

The history of the novel in the eighteenth century cor- 
responds with the general movement of ideas ; the novel 
begins as art, and proceeds to propagandism. Alain- 
Kene Lesage, born at Sarzeau, near Vannes, in 1668, 
belongs as much to the seventeenth as to the eighteenth 
century. His life of nearly eighty years (died 1747) was 
the honourable life of a bourgeois, who'was also a man 
of genius, and who maintained his own independence 
and that of his wife and children by the steadfast dili- 
gence of his pen. He was no passionate reformer, no 
preacher of ideas ; he observed life and human nature 
with shrewd common-sense, seeing men in general as 
creatures in whom good and evil are mixed ; his imagi- 
nation combined and vivified all he had observed ; and 
he recorded the results of his study of the world in a 
style admirable for naturalness and ease, though these 
were not attained without the careful practice of literary 
art. 

From translations for the readers of fiction and for 
the theatre, he advanced to free adaptations, and from 
these to work which may be called truly original. 
Directed by the Abbe de Lyonne to Spanish literature, 
he endeavoured in his early plays to preserve what was 
brilliant and ingenious in the works of Spanish drama- 
tists, and to avoid what was strained and extravagant. 
In his Crispin Rival de son Maitre (1707), in which the 



LESAGE 207 

roguish valet aspires to carry off his master's betrothed 
and her fortune, he borrows only the idea of Mendoza's 
play ; the conduct of the action, the dialogue, the char- 
acters are his own. His prose story of the same year, 
Le Diable Boiteux, owes but little to the suggestion 
derived from Guevara ; it is, in fact, more nearly re- 
lated to the Caracteres of La Bruyere ; when Asmodsus 
discloses what had been hidden under the house-roofj 
of the city, a succession of various human types are 
presented, and, as in the case of La Bruyere, contem- 
poraries attempted to identify these with actual living 
persons. 

In his remarkable satiric comedy Tur caret, and in his 
realistic novel Gil Bias, Lesage enters into full pos- 
session of his own genius. Turcaret, ou le Financier, was 
completed early in 1708 ; the efforts of the financiers 
to hinder its performance served in the end to enhance 
its brief and brilliant success. The pitiless amasser of 
wealth, Turcaret, is himself the dupe of a coquette, 
who in her turn is the victim of a more contemptible 
swindler. Lesage, presenting a fragment of the man- 
ners and morals of his day, keeps us in exceedingly 
ill company, but the comic force of the play lightens 
the oppression of its repulsive characters. It is the 
first masterpiece of the eighteenth - century comedie de 
Mieurs. 

Much of Lesage's dramatic work was produced only 
for the hour or the moment — pieces thrown off, some- 
times with brilliance and wit, for the Theatres de la Foire, 
where farces, vaudevilles, and comic opera were popular. 
They served to pay for the bread of his household. His 
great comedy, however, a comedy in a hundred acts, is 
the story of Gil Bias. Its composition was part of his 



268 FRENCH LITERATURE 

employment during many years ; the first volumes ap- 
peared in 1715, the last volume in 1735. The question 
of a Spanish original for the story is settled — there was 
none ; but from Spanish fiction and from Spanish history 
Lesage borrowed what suited his purpose, without in any 
way compromising his originality. To the picaresque 
tales (and among these may be noted a distant precursor 
of Gil Bias in the Francion of Charles Sorel) he added his 
own humanity, and in place of a series of vulgar adven- 
tures we are given a broad picture of social life ; the 
comedy of manners and intrigue grows, as the author 
proceeds, into a comedy of character, and to this some- 
thing of the historical novel is added. The unity of the 
book is found in the person of Gil Bias himself : he is far 
from being a hero, but he is capable of receiving all im- 
pressions ; he is an excellent observer of life, his temper 
is bright, he is free from ill-nature ; we meet in him a 
pleasant companion, and accompany him with sympathy 
through the amusing Odyssey of his varied career. 

As a moralist Lesage is the reverse of severe, but he is 
far from being base. " All is easy and good-humoured," 
wrote Sir Walter Scott, " gay, light, and lively ; even the 
cavern of the robbers is illuminated with a ray of that wit 
with which Lesage enlightens his whole narrative. It is 
a work which renders the reader pleased with himself 
and with mankind, where faults are placed before him in 
the light of follies rather than vices, and where misfor- 
tunes are so interwoven with the ludicrous that we laugh 
n the very act of sympathising with them." In the earlier 
portion incidents preponderate over character ; in the 
close, some signs of the writer's fatigue appear. Of 
Lesage's other tales and translations, Le Bachelier de 
Salamanque (1736) takes deservedly the highest rank. 



MARIVAUX 



>.Gg 



With Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux 
(1688-1763) the novel ceases to be primarily a study of 
manners or a romance of adventures; it becomes an 
analysis of passions to which manners and adventures 
are subordinate. As a journalist he may be said to have 
proceeded from Addison ; by his novels he prepared the 
way for Richardson and for Rousseau. His early tra- 
vesties of Homer and of Fenelon's Telemaque seem to 
indicate a tendency towards realism, but Marivaux's 
realism took the form not so much of observation of 
society in its breadth and variety as of psychological 
analysis. If he did not know the broad highway of 
the heart, he traversed many of its secret paths. His 
was a feminine spirit, delicate, fragile, curious, uncon- 
cerned about general ideas ; and yet, while untiring in 
his anatomy of the passions, he was not truly passionate ; 
his heart may be said to have been in his head. 

In the opening of the eighteenth century there was a 
revival of preciosity, which Moliere had never really 
killed, and in the salon of Madame de Lambert, Marivaux 
may have learned something of his metaphysics of love 
and something of his subtleties or affectations of style. 
He anticipates the sensibility of the later part of the 
century ; but sensibility with Marivaux is not profound, 
and it is relieved by intellectual vivacity. His con- 
ception of love has in it not a little of mere gallantry. 
Like later eighteenth-century writers, he at once exalts 
''virtue," and indulges his fancy in a licence which does 
not tend towards good morals or manners. His Vie de 
Marianne (1 731-41), which occupied him during many 
years, is a picture of social life, and a study, sometimes 
infinitely subtle, of the emotions of his heroine ; her 
genius for coquetry is finely allied to her maiden pride \ 



270 FRENCH LITERATURE 

the hypocrite, M. de Climal — old angel fallen — is a new 
variety of the family of Tartufe. Le Paysan Parvenu 
(1735-36), which tells of the successes of 'one whom 
women favour, is on a lower level of art and of morals. 
Both novels were left unfinished ; and while both attract, 
they also repel, and finally weary the reader. 1 Their 
influence was considerable in converting the romance 
of adventures into the romance of emotional incident 
and analysis. 

The work of Marivaux for the stage is more important 
than his work in prose fiction. His comedy has been 
described as the tragedy of Racine transposed, with love 
leading to marriage, not to death. Love is his central 
theme — sometimes in conflict with self-love — and women 
are his protagonists. He discovers passion in its germ, 
and traces it through its shy developments. His plays are 
little romances handled in dramatic fashion ; each records 
some delicate adventure of the heart. He wrote much for 
the Comedie-Italienne, where he did not suffer from the 
tyranny of rules and models, and where his graceful 
fancy had free play. Of his large repertoire, the most 
admirable pieces are Le Jeu de P Amour et du Hasard 
(1730) and Les Fausses Confidences (1732). In the former 
the heroine and her chambermaid exchange costumes ; 
the hero and his valet make a like exchange ; yet love 
is not misled, and heroine and hero find each other 
through their disguises. In Les Fausses Confidences the 
young widow Araminte is won to a second love in spite 
of her resolve, and becomes the happy victim of her 
own tender heart and of the devices of her assailants. 
The " marivaudage " of Marivaux is sometimes a refined 

1 The twelfth part of Marianne is by Madam Riccoboni. Only five parts 
of the Paysan are by Marivaux. 



THE ABBE PREVOST 271 

and novel mode of expressing delicate shades and half- 
shades of feeling ; sometimes an over-refined or over- 
subtle attempt to express ingenuities of sentiment, and 
the result is then frigid, pretentious, or pedantic. Xo 
one excelled him in the art, described by Voltaire, of 
weighing flies' eggs in gossamer scales. 

The Abbe A.-F. PrEvost d'Exiles (1697-1763) is 
remembered by a single tale of rare power and beauty, 
Manon Lescaut, but his work in literature was voluminous 
and varied. Having deserted his Benedigtine monastery 
in 1728, he led for a time an irregular and wandering life 
in England and Holland ; then returning to Paris, he 
gained a living by swift and ceaseless production for the 
booksellers. In his journal, Le Pour et le Contre, he did 
much to inform his countrymen respecting English 
literature, and among his translations are those of Rich- 
ardson's Pamela, Sir Charles Grandison, and Clarissa 
Harloive. Many of his novels are melodramatic narra- 
tives of romantic adventure, having a certain kinship 
to our later romances of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew 
Gregory Lewis, in which horror and pity, blood and 
tears abound. Sometimes, however, when he writes of 
passion, we feel that he is engaged in no sport of the 
imagination, but transcribing the impulsive speech of his 
own tumultuous heart. The Memoires d'un Homme de 
Qualite, Cleveland, Le Doyen de Killerine are tragic narra- 
tives, in which love is the presiding power. 
• Marion Lescaut, which appeared in 1731, as an episode 
of the first of these, is a tale of fatal and irresistible 
passion. The heroine is divided in heart between her 
mundane tastes for luxury and her love for the Cheva- 
lier des Grieux. He, knowing her inconstancy and in- 
firmity, yet cannot escape from the tyranny of the spell 



272 FRENCH LITERATURE 

which has subdued him ; his whole life is absorbed and 
lost in his devotion to Manon, and he is with her in 
the American wilds at the moment of her piteous death. 
The admirable literary style of Manon Lescaut is unfelt 
and disappears, so directly does it bring us into contact 
with the motions of a human heart. 

In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophy, 
on the one hand, invaded the novel and the short tale ; 
on the other hand it was invaded by a flood of sentiment. 
An irritated and irritating sensuality could accommodate 
.ifself either to sentiment or to philosophy. Voltaire's 
tales are, in narrative form, criticisms of belief or opinion 
which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple, Mar- 
montel, would "render virtue amiable" in his Contes 
Moranx (1761), and cure the ravage of passion with a 
canary's song. His more ambitious Belisaire seems to 
a modern reader a masterpiece in the genre ennuyeux. 
His Incas is exotic without colour or credibility. Florian, 
with little skill, imitated the Incas and Tele'maque, or was 
feebly idyllic and conventionally pastoral as a follower of 
the Swiss Gessner. Restif de la Bretonne could be gross, 
corrupt, declamatory, sentimental, humanitarian in turns 
or all together. Three names are eminent — that of 
Diderot, who flung his good and evil powers, mingling 
and fermenting, into his novels as into all else ; that of 
Rousseau, who interpreted passion, preached its re- 
straints, depicted the charms of the domestic interior, 
and presented the glories of external nature in La Nou- 
velle Heloise ; that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who 
reaches a hand to Rousseau on the one side, and on the 
other to Chateaubriand. 






CHAPTER II 

MONTESQUIEU— VAUVENARGUES— VOLTAIRE 



The author of De V Esprit des Lois was as important in 
the history of European speculation as in that of French 
literature ; but inevitable changes of circumstances and 
ideas have caused his influence to wane. His life was 
one in which the great events were thoughts. Charles- 
Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was born 
in 1689 at La Brede, near Bordeaux. After his years of 
education by the Oratorians, which left him with some- 
thing of scepticism in his intellect, and something of 
stoicism in his character, he pursued legal studies, and in 
1716 became President of the Parliament of Bordeaux. 
The scientific researches of his day attracted him ; 
investigating anatomy, botany, natural philosophy, the 
history of the earth, he came to see man as a portion of 
nature, or at least as a creature whose life is largely 
determined by natural laws. With a temper of happy 
serenity, and an admirable balance of faculties, he was 
possessed by an eager intellectual curiosity. " I spend 
my life," he said, "in examining; everything interests, 
everything surprises me." 

Nothing, however, interested him so much as the 
phenomena of human society ; he had no aptitude for 

273 



274 FRENCH LITERATURE 

metaphysical speculations ; his feeling for literature and 
art was defective ; he honoured the antique world, but it 
was the Greek and Latin historians and the ideals of 
Roman virtue and patriotism which most deeply moved 
him. At the same time he was a man of his own genera- 
tion, and while essentially serious, he explored the frivo- 
lous side of life, and yielded his imagination to the licence 
of the day. 

With enough wit and enough wantonness to capture a 
multitude of readers, the Lettres Persanes (1721) contain a 
serious criticism of French society in the years of the 
Regency. It matters little that the idea of the book may 
have been suggested by the Siamese travellers of Du- 
fresny's Amusements ; the treatment is essentially original. 
Things Oriental were in fashion — Galland had translated 
the Arabian Nights (1704-1708) — and Montesquieu de- 
lighted in books of travel which told of the manners, 
customs, religions, governments of distant lands. His 
Persians, Usbek and Rica, one the more philosophical, 
the other the more satirical, visit Europe, inform their 
friends by letter of all the aspects of European and espe- 
cially of French life, and receive tidings from Persia of 
affairs of the East, including the troubles and intrigues 
of the eunuchs and ladies of the harem. The spirit of the 
reaction against the despotism of Louis XIV. is expressed 
in Montesquieu's pages ; the spirit also of religious free- 
thought, and the reaction against ecclesiastical tyranny. 
A sense of the dangers impending over society is present, 
and of the need of temperate reform. Brilliant, daring, 
ironical, licentious as the Persian Letters are, the pre- 
vailing tone is that of judicious moderation ; and already 
something can be discerned of the large views and wise 
liberality of the Esprit des Lois. The book is valuable 



MONTESQUIEU 275 

to us still as a document in the social history of the 
eighteenth century. 

In Paris, Montesquieu formed many distinguished ac- 
quaintances, among others that of Mdlle. de Clermont, 
sister of the Duke de Bourbon. Perhaps it was in 
homage to her that he wrote his prose-poem, which 
pretends to be a translation from the Greek, Le Temple 
de Guide (1725). Its feeling for antiquity is overlaid by 
the artificialities, long since faded, of his own day — ■ 
"naught remains," writes M. Sorel, "but the faint and 
subtle perfume of a sachet long hidden in a rococo 
cabinet." Although his publications were anonymous, 
Montesquieu was elected a member of the Academy 
in 1728, and almost immediately after this he quitted 
France for a long course of travel throughout Europe, 
undertaken with the purpose of studying the manners, 
institutions, and governments of foreign lands. At 
Venice he gained the friendship of Lord Chesterfield, 
and they arrived together in England, where for nearly 
two years Montesquieu remained, frequently hearing the 
parliamentary debates, and studying the principles of 
English politics in the writings of Locke. His thoughts 
on government were deeply influenced by his admira- 
tion of the British constitution with its union of freedom 
and order attained by a balance of the various political 
powers of the State. On Montesquieu's return to La 
Brede he occupied himself with that great work which 
resumes the observations and meditations of twenty 
years, the Esprit des Lois. In the history of Rome, 
which impressed his imagination with its vast moral, 
social, and political significance, he found a signal 
example of the causes which lead a nation to greatness 
and the causes which contribute to its decline. The 



rfS FRENCH LITERATURE 

study made at this point of view detached itself from the 
more comprehensive work which he had undertaken, and 
in 1734 appeared his Considerations sur les Causes de la 
Grandeur ct de la Decadence des Romains. 

Bossuet had dealt nobly with Roman history, but 
in the spirit of a theologian expounding the course 
of Divine Providence in human affairs. Montesquieu 
studied the operation of natural causes. His know- 
ledge, indeed, was incomplete, but it was the knowledge 
afforded by the scholarship of his own time. The love 
of liberty, the patriotic pride, the military discipline, the 
education in public spirit attained by discussion, the 
national fortitude under reverses, the support given to 
peoples against their rulers, the respect for the religion 
of conquered tribes and races, the practice of dealing 
at one time with only a single hostile power, are pointed 
out as contributing to the supremacy of Rome in the 
ancient world. Its decadence is explained as the gradual 
result of its vast overgrowth, its civil wars, the loss of 
patriotism among the soldiery engaged in remote pro- 
vinces, the inroads of luxury, the proscription of citizens, 
the succession of unworthy rulers, the division of the 
Empire, the incursion of the barbarians ; and in treating 
this portion of his subject Montesquieu may be said to 
be wholly original. A short Dialogue de Sylla et d' Eucrate 
may be viewed as a pendant to the Considerations, dis- 
cussing a fragment of the subject in dramatic form. 
Montesquieu's desire to arrive at general truths some- 
times led him to large conclusions resting on too slender 
a basis of fact ; but the errors in applying his method 
detract only a little from the service which he rendered 
to thought in a treatment of history at least tending in 
the direction of philosophic truth. 



THE ESPRIT DES LOIS 277 

The whole of his mind— almost the whole of his exist- 
ence — is embodied in the Esprit des Lois (1748). It lacks 
the unity of a ruling idea; it is deficient in construction, 
in continuity, in cohesion ; much that it contains has 
grown obsolete or is obsolescent ; yet in the literature of 
eighteenth-century thought it takes, perhaps, the highest 
place ; and it must always be precious as the self-reveal- 
ment of a great intellect — swift yet patient, ardent yet 
temperate, liberal yet the reverse of revolutionary — an 
intellect that before all else loved the light. It lacks 
unity, because its author's mind was many-sided, and 
he would not suppress a portion of himself to secure a 
factitious unity. Montesquieu was a student of science, 
who believed in the potency of the laws of nature, and 
he saw that human society is the product of, or at least 
is largely modified by, natural law ; he was also a be- 
liever in the power of human reason and human will, 
an admirer of Roman virtue, a citizen, a patriot, and a 
reformer. He would write the natural history of human 
laws, exhibit the invariable principles from which they 
proceed, and reduce the study of governments to a 
science ; but at the same time he would exhibit how 
society acts upon itself; he would warn and he would 
exhort ; he would help, if possible, to create intelligent 
and patriotic citizens. To these intentions we may 
add another — that of a criticism, touched with satire, of 
the contemporary political and social arrangements of 
France. 

And yet again, Montesquieu was a legist, with some of 
the curiosity of an antiquary, not without a pride in his 
rank, interested in its origins, and desirous to trace the 
history of feudal laws and privileges. The Esprit dcs 
Lois is not a doctrinaire exposition of a theory, but the 



278 FRENCH LITERATURE 

record of a varied life of thought, in which there are 
certain dominant tendencies, but no single absolute idea. 
The forms of government, according to Montesquieu, 
are three — republic (including both the oligarchical 
republic and the democratic), monarchy, despotism. 
Each of these structural arrangements requires a prin- 
ciple, a moral spring, to give it force and action : the 
popular republic lives by virtue of patriotism, public 
spirit, the love of equality ; the aristocratic republic lives 
by the spirit of moderation among the members of the 
ruling class ; monarchy lives by the stimulus of honour, 
the desire of superiority and distinction ; despotism draws 
its vital force from fear ; but each of these principles 
may perish through its corruption or excess. The laws 
.of each country, its criminal and civil codes, its system 
of education, its sumptuary regulations, its treatment of 
the relation of the sexes, are intimately connected with 
the form of government, or rather with the principle 
which animates that form. 

Laws, under the several forms of government, are next 
considered in reference to the power of the State for 
purposes of defence and of attack. The nature of poli- 
tical liberty is investigated, and the requisite separation 
of the legislative, judicial, and administrative powers is 
exhibited in the example set forth in the British con- 
stitution. But political freedom must include the liberty 
of the individual ; the rights of the citizen must be 
respected and guaranteed ; and, as part of the regulation 
of individual freedom, the levying and collection of taxes 
must be studied. 

From this subject Montesquieu passes to his theory, 
once celebrated, of the influence of climate and the soil 
upon the various systems of legislation, and especially 



THE ESPRIT DES LOIS 279 

the influence of climate upon the slave system, the virtual 
servitude of woman, and the growth of political despotism. 
Over against the fatalism of climate and natural condi- 
tions he sets the duty of applying the reason to modify 
the influences of external nature by wise institutions, 
National character, and the manners and customs which 
are its direct expression, if they cannot be altered by 
laws, must be respected, and something even of direc- 
tion or regulation may be attained. Laws in relation to 
commerce, to money, to population, to religion, are dealt 
with in successive books. 

The duty of religious toleration is urged from the point 
of view of a statesman, while the discussions of theology 
are declined. Very noteworthy is the humble remon- 
strance to the inquisitors of Spain and Portugal ascribed 
to a Jew of eighteen, who is supposed to have perished in 
the last auto-da-fe. The facts of the civil order are not to 
be judged by the laws of the religious order, any more 
than the facts of the religious order are to be judged 
by civil laws. Here the great treatise might have closed, 
but Montesquieu adds what may be styled an historical 
appendix in his study of the origin and development of 
feudal laws. At a time when antiquity was little re- 
garded, he was an ardent lover of antiquity ; at a time 
when mediasval history was ignored, he was a student of 
the forgotten centuries. 

Such in outline is the great work which in large 
measure modified the course of eighteenth - century 
thought. Many of its views have been superseded ; 
its collections of facts are not critically dealt with ; its 
ideas often succeed each other without logical sequence ; 
but Montesquieu may be said to have created a method, 
if not a science ; he brought the study of jurisprudence 






28a FRENCH LITERATURE 

and politics, in the widest sense, into literature, laicising 
and popularising the whole subject ; he directed history 
to the investigation of causes ; he led men to feel the 
greatness of the social institution ; and, while retiring 
from view behind his work, he could not but exhibit, for 
his own day and for ours, the spectacle of a great mind 
operating over a vast field in the interests of truth, the 
spectacle of a great nature that loved the light, hating 
despotism, but fearing revolution, sane, temperate, wisely 
benevolent. In years tyrannised over by abstract ideas, 
his work remained to plead for the concrete and the his- 
torical ; among men devoted to the absolute in theory 
and the extreme in practice, it remained to justify the 
relative, to demand a consideration of circumstances and 
conditions, to teach men how large a field of reform lay 
within the bounds of moderation and good sense. 

The Esprit des Lois was denounced by Jansenists and 
Jesuits ; it was placed in the Index, but in less than two 
years twenty-two editions had appeared, and it was trans- 
lated into many languages. The author justified it bril- 
liantly in his Defense of 1750. His later writings are of 
small importance. With failing eyesight in his declining 
years, he could enjoy the society of friends and the illumi- 
nation of his great fame. He died tranquilly (1755) at 
the age of sixty-six, in the spirit of a Christian Stoic. 



II 

The life of society was studied by Montesquieu ; the 
inward life of the heart was studied by a young moralist, 
whose premature loss was lamented with tender passion 
by Voltaire. 



VAUVENARGUES 281 

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, though 
neither a thinker nor a writer of the highest order, 
attaches us by the beauty of his character as seen through 
his half-finished work, more than any other author of the 
earlier part of the eighteenth century. He was born 
(1715) at Aix, in Provence, received a scanty education, 
served in the army during more than ten years, retired 
with broken health and found no other employment, 
lived on modest resources, enjoyed the acquaintance of 
the Marquis de Mirabeau and the friendship and high 
esteem of Voltaire, and died in 1747, at the early age of 
thirty-two. His knowledge of literature hardly extended 
beyond that of his French predecessors of the seven- 
teenth century. The chief influences that reached him 
came from Pascal, Bossuet, and Fenelon. His learning 
was derived from action, from the observation of men, 
and from acquaintance with his own heart. 

The writings of Vauvenargues are the fragmentary 
Introduction a la Connaissance de l' Esprit Humain, followed 
by Reflexions et Maximes (1746), and a few short pieces 
of posthumous publication. He is a moralist, who 
studies those elements of character which tend to action, 
and turns away from metaphysical speculations. His 
early faith in Christianity insensibly declined and dis- 
appeared, but his spirit remained religious ; he believed 
in God and immortality, and he never became a militant 
philosopher. He thought generously of human nature, 
but without extravagant optimism. The reason, acting 
alone, he distrusted ; he found the source of our 
highest convictions and our noblest practice in the 
emotions, in the heart, in the obscure depths of char- 
acter and of nature. Here, indeed, is Vauvenargues' 
originality. In an age of ill living, he conceived a 



L 



282 FRENCH LITERATURE 

worthy ideal of conduct ; in an age tending towards 
an exaggerated homage to reason, he honoured the 
passions : "Great thoughts come from the heart" ; "We 
owe, perhaps, to the passions the greatest gains of the 
intellect " ; " The passions have taught men reason." 

Vauvenargues, with none of the violences of Rousseau's 
temperament, none of the excess of his sensibility, by 
virtue of his recognition of the potency of nature, of 
the heart, may be called a precursor of Rousseau. Into 
his literary criticism he carries the same tendencies : it 
is far from judicial criticism ; its merit is that it is per- 
sonal and touched with emotion. His total work seems 
but a fragment, yet his life had a certain completeness ; 
he knew how to act, to think, to feel, and after great 
sufferings, borne with serenity, he knew how to die. 



Ill 

The movement of Voltaire's mind went with that of 
the general mind of France. During the first half of the 
century he was primarily a man of letters ; from about 
1750 onwards he was the aggressive philosopher, the 
social reformer, using letters as the vehicle of militant 
ideas. 

Born in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary of good 
family, Francois - Marie Arouet, who assumed the 
name Voltaire (probably an anagram formed from the 
letters of Arouet l.j., that is le jeune), was educated by 
the Jesuits, and became a precocious versifier of little 
pieces in the taste of the time. At an early age he was 
introduced to the company of the wits and fine gentle- 
men who formed the sceptical and licentious Society of 



VOLTAIRE'S YOUTH 283 

the Temple. Old Arouet despaired of his son, who was 
eager for pleasure, and a reluctant student of the law. 
A short service in Holland, in the household of the 
French ambassador, produced no better result than a 
fruitless love-intrigue. 

Again in Paris, where he ill endured the tedium of an 
attorney's office, Voltaire haunted the theatres and the 
salons, wrote light verse and indecorous tales, planned 
his tragedy CEdipe, and, inspired by old M. de Caumar- 
tin's enthusiasm for Henri IV., conceived the idea of 
his Henriade. Suspected of having written defamatory 
verses against the Regent, he was banished from the 
capital, and when readmitted was for eleven months, on 
the suspicion of more atrocious libels, a prisoner in the 
Bastille. Here he composed — according to his own 
declaration, in sleep — the second canto of the Henriade, 
and completed his CEdipe, which was presented with 
success before the close of 171 8. The prisoner of the 
Bastille became the favourite of society, and repaid 
his aristocratic hosts by the brilliant sallies of his 
conversation. 

A second tragedy, A rtemire, afterwards recast as Mari- 
amne, was ill received in its earlier form. Court pensions, 
the death of his father, and lucky financial speculations 
brought Voltaire independence. He travelled in 1722 to 
Holland, met Jean-Baptiste Rousseau on the way, and 
read aloud for his new acquaintance Le Pour et le Contre, 
a poem of faith and unfaith — faith in Deism, disbelief 
in Christianity. The meeting terminated with untimely 
wit at Rousseau's expense and mutual hostility. Unable 
to obtain the approbation for printing his epic, after- 
wards named La Henriade, Voltaire arranged for a secret 
impression, under the title La Ligue, at Rouen (1723), 



284 FRENCH LITERATURE 

whence many copies were smuggled into Paris. The 
young Queen, Marie Lecszinska, before whom his 
Mariamne and the comedy L Indiscret were presented, 
favoured Voltaire. His prospects were bright, when 
sudden disaster fell. A quarrel in the theatre with the 
Chevalier de Rohan, followed by personal violence at 
the hands of the Chevalier's bullies, ended for Voltaire, 
not with the justice which he demanded, but with his 
own lodgment in the Bastille. When released, with 
orders to quit Paris, he thought of his acquaintance 
and admirer Bolingbroke, and lost no time in taking 
refuge on English soil. 

Voltaire's residence in England extended over three 
years (1726-29). Bolingbroke, Peterborough, Chester- 
field, Pope, Swift, Gay, Thomson, Young, Samuel Clarke 
were among his acquaintances. He discovered the 
genius of that semi -barbarian Shakespeare, but found 
the only reasonable English tragedy in Addison's " Cato." 
He admired the epic power of Milton, and scorned 
Milton's allegory of Sin and Death. He found a 
master of philosophy in Locke. He effected a partial 
entrance into the scientific system of Newton. He read 
with zeal the writings of those pupils of Bayle, the 
English Deists. He honoured English freedom and 
the spirit of religious toleration. In 1728 the Henriade 
was published by subscription in London, and brought 
the author prodigious praise and not a little pelf. He 
collected material for his Histoire de Charles XII., and, 
observing English life and manners, prepared the Lettres 
Philosophiquesy which were to make the mind of England 
favourably known to his countrymen. 

Charles XII., like La Ligne, was printed at Rouen, and 
smuggled into Paris. The tragedies Brutus -and Eriphyle, 



VOLTAIRE AT CIREY 285 

both of which show the influence of the English drama,, 
were coldly received. Voltaire rose from his fall, and 
produced Zaire (1732), a kind of eighteenth-century 
French " Othello," which proved a triumph ; it was 
held that Corneille and Racine h?«.d been surpassed. In 
1733 a little work of mingled verse and prose, the Temple 
du Gout, in which recent and. -contemporary writers were 
criticised, gratified the self-esteem of some, and wounded 
the vanity of a larger number of his fellow-authors. The 
Lcitres Philosophiques sur les Anglais, which followed, 
were condemned by the Parliament to be burnt by 
the public executioner. With other audacities of his 
pen, the storm increased. Voltaire took shelter (1734) 
in Champagne, at Cirey, the chateau of Madame du 
Chatelet. 

Voltaire was forty years of age ; Madame, a woman of 
intellect and varied culture, was twelve years younger. 
During fifteen years, when he was not wandering 
abroad, Cirey was the home of Voltaire, and Madame 
du Chatelet his sympathetic, if sometimes his exacting 
companion. To this period belong the dramas Alzii'e, 
Zulime, L Enfant Prodigue, Mahomet, Merope, Nanine. 
The divine Emilie was devoted to science, and Voltaire 
interpreted the Newtonian philosophy to France or dis- 
cussed questions of physics. Many admirable pieces of 
verse — ethical essays in the manner of Pope, lighter poems 
of occasion, Le Mondain, which contrasts the golden age of 
simplicity with the much more agreeable age of luxury, 
and many besides — were written. Progress was made with 
the shameless burlesque on Joan of Arc, La Pucelle. In 
Zadig Voltaire gave the first example of his sparkling tales 
in prose. Serious historical labours occupied him — after- 
wards to be published — the Siecle de Louis XLV. and the 



i 



2 86 FRENCH LITERATURE 

great Uss'ai sur les Mceurs. In 1746, with the support of 
Madame de Pompadour, he entered the French Academy. 
The death of Madame du Chatelet, in 1749, was a cruel 
blow to Voltaire. He endeavoured in Paris to find con- 
solation in dramatic efforts, entering into rivalry with the 
aged Crebillon. 

Among Voltaire's correspondents, when he dwelt at 
Grey, was the Crown Prince of Prussia, a royal philo- 
sophy and aspirant French poet. Royal flatteries were 
not more grateful to Voltaire than philosophic and lite- 
rary flatteries were to Frederick. Personal acquaintance 
followed ; but Frederick would not receive Madame du 
Chatelet, and Voltaire would not desert his companion. 
Now when Madame was dead, when the Pompadour 
ceased from her favours to the poet, when Louis turned 
his back in response to a compliment, Frederick was. to 
secure his philosopher. In July 1750 Voltaire was in- 
stalled at Berlin. For a time that city was " the paradise 
of philosophesl' 

The Steele de Louis XIV. was published next year. 
Voltaire's insatiable cupidity, his tricks, his tempers, his 
vindictiveness, shown in the Diatribe du Docteur Akakia 
(an embittered attack on Maupertuis), alienated the King ; 
when "the orange" of Voltaire's genius "was sucked" 
he would " throw away the rind." With unwilling delays, 
and the humiliation of an arrest at Frankfort, Voltaire 
escaped from the territory of the royal " Solomon " (1753), 
and attracted to Switzerland by its spirit of toleration, 
found himself in 1755 tenant of the chateau which he 
named Les Delices, near Geneva, his "summer palace," 
and that of Monrion, his "winter palace," in the neigh- 
bourhood of Lausanne. His pen was busy : the tragedy 
L'Orphelin de la Chine, tales, fugitive verses, the poem on 



the patriarch of ferney 287 

the earthquake at Lisbon, with its doubtful assertion of 
Providence as a slender counterpoise to the certainty of 
innumerable evils in the world, pursued one another in 
varied succession. Still keeping in his hands Les Delices, 
he purchased in 1758 the chateau and demesne of Ferney 
on French soil, and became a kind of prince and patriarch, 
a territorial lord, wisely benevolent to the little com- 
munity which he made to flourish around him, and at 
the same time the intellectual potentate of Europe. 

Never had his brain been more alert and indefatigable. 
The years from 1760 to 1778 were years of incessant 
activity. Tragedy, comedy, opera, epistles, satires, tales 
in verse, La Pucelle, 1 Le Pauvre Diable (admirable in its 
malignity), literary criticism, a commentary on Corneille 
(published for the benefit of the great dramatist's grand- 
niece), brilliant tales in prose, the Essai sur les Moeurs et 
F Esprit des Nations, the Histoire de I' Empire de Russie sous 
Pierre le Grand, with other voluminous historical works, 
innumerable writings in philosophy, in religious polemics, 
including many articles of the Dictionnaire Philosophique, 
in politics, in jurisprudence, a vast correspondence which 
extended his influence over the whole of Europe — these 
are but a part of the achievement of a sexagenarian 
progressing to become an octogenarian. 

His work was before all else a warfare against in- 
tolerance and in favour of free thought. The grand 
enemy of intellectual liberty Voltaire saw in the super- 
stition of the Church ; his word of command was 
short and uncompromising — Ecrasez I'lnfame. Jean 
Calas, a Protestant of Toulouse, falsely accused of the 
murder of his son, who was alleged to have been converted 
to the Roman communion, was tortured and broken on 

1 First authorised edition, 1762; surreptitiously printed, 1755. 



288 FRENCH LITERATURE 

the wheel. Voltaire, with incredible zeal, took up the 
victim's cause, and finally established the dead man's 
innocence. Sirven, a Protestant, declared guilty of the 
murder of his Roman Catholic daughter, was beggared 
and banished ; Voltaire succeeded, after eight years, in 
effecting the reversal of the sentence. La Barre was 
tortured and decapitated for alleged impiety. Voltaire 
v as not strong enough to overpower the French magis- 
tracy supported now by the French monarch. He 
turned to Frederick with a request that he would 
give shelter to a colony of philosophes, who should 
through the printing-press make a united assault upon 
I In fame. 

In the early days of 1778, Voltaire, urged by friends, 
imprudently consented to visit Paris. His journey was 
like a regal progress ; his reception in the Capital was an 
overwhelming ovation. In March he was ailing, but he 
rose from his bed, was present at a performance of his 
Irene, and became the hero and the victim of extravagant 
popular enthusiasm. In April he eagerly pleaded at the 
French Academy for a new dictionary, and undertook 
himself to superintend the letter A. In May he was 
dangerously ill} on the 26th he had the joy of learning 
that his efforts to vindicate the memory of the unfor- 
tunate Count Lally were crowned with success. It was 
Voltaire's last triumph ; four days later, unshriven and 
i unhouseled, he expired. Seldom had such a coil of elec- 
trical energy been lodged within a human brain. His 
desire for intellectual activity was a consuming passion. 
His love of influence, his love of glory were boundless. 
Subject to spasms of intensest rage, capable of malig- 
nant trickery to gain his ends, jealous, mean, irreverent, 
mendacious, he had yet a heart open to charity and pity, 



VOLTAIRE'S RULING IDEAS 289 

a zeal for human welfare, a loyalty to his ruling ideas, 
and a saving good sense founded upon his swift and 
clear perception of reality. 

Voltaire's mind has been described as " a chaos of 
clear ideas." It is easy to point out the inconsistencies 
of his opinions, yet certain dominant thoughts can be 
distinguished amid the chaos. He believed in a God ; 
the arrangements of the universe require a designer ; 
the idea of God is a benefit to society — if He did not 
exist, He must be invented. But to suppose that the 
Deity intervenes in the affairs of the world is super- 
stition ; He rules through general laws — His executive; 
He is represented in the heart of man by His viceroy 
— conscience. The soul is immortal, and God is just ; 
therefore let wrong-doers beware. In L Histoire de Jenni 
the youthful hero is perverted by his atheistic associates, 
and does not fear to murder his creditor ; he is recon- 
verted to theism, and becomes one of the best men in 
England. As to the evil which darkens the world, we 
cannot understand it ; let us not make it worse by vain 
perplexities ; let us hope that a future life will right the 
balance of things ; and, meanwhile, let us attend to the 
counsels of moderation and good sense ; let the narrow 
bounds of our knowledge at least teach us the lesson 
of toleration. 

Applied to history, such ideas lead Voltaire, in striking 
contrast with Bossuet, to ignore the supernatural, to 
eliminate the Providential order, and to seek the expla- 
nation of events in human opinion, in human sentiments, 
in the influence of great men, even in the influence of 
petty accident, the caprice of sa Majeste le Hasard. hi 
the epoch of classical antiquity — which Voltaire under- 
stood ill — man had advanced from barbarism to a con- 



2 9 o FRENCH LITERATURE 

dition of comparative well-being and good sense ; in the 
Christian and mediaeval period there was a recoil and 
retrogression ; in modern times has begun a renewed 
advance. In fixing attention on the esprit et mozurs 
of nations— their manners, opinions, institutions, senti- 
ments, prejudices— Voltaire was original, and rendered 
most important service to the study of history. Although, 
his blindness to the significance of religious phenomena 
is a grave defect, his historical scepticism had its uses. 
As a writer of historical narrative he is admirably lucid 
and rapid ; nor should the ease of his narration conceal 
the fact that he worked laboriously and carefully among 
original sources. With his Charles XII., his Pierre le 
Grand, his Siecle de Louis XIV., we may class the Hen- 
riade as a piece of history ; its imaginative power is not 
that of an epic, but it is an interpretation of a fragment 
of French history in the light of one generous idea — 
that of religious toleration. 

Filled with destructive passion against the Church, 
Voltaire, in affairs of the State, was a conservative. His 
ideal for France was an intelligent despotism. But if a 
conservative, he was one of a reforming spirit. He 
pleaded for freedom in the internal trade of province 
w 7 ith province, for legal and administrative uniformity 
throughout the whole country, for a reform of the magis- 
tracy, for a milder code of criminal jurisprudence, for 
attention to public hygiene. His programme was not 
ambitious, but it was reasonable, and his efforts for the 
general welfare have been justified by time. 

As a literary critic he was again conservative. He 
belonged to the classical school, and to its least liberal 
section. He regarded literary forms as imposed from 
without on the content of poetry, not as growing from 



VOLTAIRE'S DRAMATIC WORK 291 

within ; passion and imagination he would reduce to 
the strict bounds of uninspired good sense ; he placed 
Virgil above Homer, and preferred French tragedy to 
that of ancient Greece ; from his involuntary admiration 
of Shakespeare he recoiled in alarm ; if he admired Cor- 
neille, it was with many reservations. Yet his taste was 
less narrow than that of some of his contemporaries; he 
had a true feeling for the genius of the French language; 
he possessed, after the manner of his nation and his 
time, le grand gout ; he honoured Boileau ; he exalted 
Racine in the highest degree ; and, to the praise of his 
discernment, it may be said that he discovered Athalic. 

The spectacular effects of Athalie impressed Voltaire's 
imagination. In his own tragedies, while continuing the 
seventeenth-century tradition, he desired to exhibit more 
striking situations, to develop more rapid action, to 
enhance the dramatic spectacle, to add local colour. 
Mis style and speech in the theatre have the conven- 
tional monotonous pomp, the conventional monotonous 
grace, without poetic charm, imaginative vision, or those 
flashes which spring from passionate genius. When, as 
was frequently the case, he wrote for the stage to ad- 
vocate the cause of an idea, to preach tolerance or pity, 
he attained a certain height of eloquence. Whatever 
sensibility there was in Voltaire's heart may be dis- 
covered in Zaire. Me'rope has the distinction of being 
a tragedy from which the passion of love is absent ; its 
interest rests wholly on maternal affection. Tancrede is 
remarkable as an eighteenth -century treatment of the 
chivalric life and spirit. The Christian temper of 
tolerance and humanity is honoured in Alzire. 

Voltaire's incomparable gift of satirical wit did not 
make him a writer of high comedy : he could be gro- 



i 



2 92 FRENCH LITERATURE 

tesque without lightness or brightness. But when a 
sentimental element mingles with the comic, and almost 
obscures it, as in Nanine (a dramatised tale derived 
from Richardson's Pamela), the verse acquires a grace, 
and certain scenes an amiable charm. Nanine, indeed, 
though in dramatic form, lies close to those tales in verse 
in which Voltaire mingled happily his wisdom and his 
wit. "The philosophy of Horace in the language of 
La Fontaine, this," writes a critic, "is what we find 
from time to time in Voltaire." In his lighter verses 
of occasion, epigram, compliment, light mockery, half- 
playful, half-serious sentiment, he is often exquisite. 

No part of Voltaire's work has suffered so little at the 
hands of time as his tales in prose. In his contributions 
to the satire of human-kind he learned something from 
Rabelais, something from Swift. It is the satire of good 
sense impatient against folly, and armed with the darts 
of wit. Voltaire does not esteem highly the wisdom of 
human creatures : they pretend to knowledge beyond 
their powers ; they kill one another for an hypothesis ; 
they find ingenious reasons for indulging their base or 
petty passions ; their lives are under the rule of sa 
Majeste le Hasard. But let us not rage in Timon's 
manner against the human race ; if the world is not 
the best of all possible worlds, it is not wholly evil. Let 
us be content to mock at the absurdity of the universe, 
and at the diverting, if irritating, follies of its inhabitants. 
Above all, let us find support in work, even though 
we do not see to what it tends ; " II faut cultiver 
notre jardin" — such is Voltaire's word, and the final 
word of Candide. With light yet effective irony, Vol- 
taire preaches the lesson of good sense. When bitter, 
he is still gay ; his sad little philosophy of existence is 



VOLTAIRE'S CORRESPONDENCE 293 

uttered with an accent of mirth ; his art in satirical 
narrative is perfect ; he is not resigned ; he is not 
enraged ; he is indignant, but at the same time he 
smiles ; there is always the last resource of blindly 
cultivating our garden. 

In Voltaire's myriad-minded correspondence the whole 
man may be found — his fire, his sense, his universal 
curiosity, his wit, his malignity, his goodness, his Protean 
versatility, his ruling ideas ; and one may say that the 
whole of eighteenth-century Europe presses into the 
pages. He is not only the man of letters, the student of 
science, the philosopher ; he is equally interested in 
politics, in social reform, in industry, in agriculture, in 
political economy, in philology, and, together with these, 
in the thousand incidents of private life. 



CHAPTER III 

DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPEDIA- 
PHILOSOPHERS, ECONOMISTS, CRITICS — BUFFON 

I 

" When I recall Diderot," wrote his friend Meister, " the 
immense variety of his ideas, the amazing multiplicity of 
his knowledge, the rapid flight, the warmth, the im- 
petuous tumult of his imagination, all the charm and all 
the disorder of his conversation, I venture to liken his 
character to Nature herself, exactly as he used to con- 
ceive her — rich, fertile, abounding in germs of every sort 
. . . without any dominating principle, without a master, 
and without a God." No image more suitable could be 
found ; and his works resemble the man, in their rich- 
ness, their fertility, their variety, and their disorder. A 
great writer we can hardly call him, for he has left no 
body of coherent thought, no piece of finished art ; but 
he was the greatest of literary improvisators. 

Denis Diderot, son of a worthy cutler of Langres, 
was born in 1713. Educated by the Jesuits, he turned 
away from the regular professions, and supported him- 
self and his ill-chosen wife by hack-work for the Paris 
booksellers — translations, philosophical essays directed 
against revealed religion, stories written to suit the appe- 
tite for garbage. From deism he advanced to atheism. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIA 295 

Arguing in favour of the relativity of human knowledge 
in his Lcttre sur les Avcugles (1749), he puts his plea for 
atheism into the lips of an English man of science, but 
the device did not save him from an imprisonment of 
three months. 

In 1745 the booksellers, contemplating a translation of 
the English "Cyclopaedia" of Chambers, appliedto Diderot 
for assistance. He readily undertook the task, but could 
not be satisfied with a mere translation. In a Prospectus 
(1750X he indicated the design of the " Encyclopaedia " 
as he conceived it : the order and connection of the 
various branches of knowledge should be set forth, and 
in dictionary form the several sciences, liberal arts, and 
mechanical arts should be dealt with by experts. The 
homage which he rendered to science expressed the mind 
of his time ; in the honour paid to mechanical toil and 
industry he was in advance of his age, and may be called 
an organiser of modern democracy. At his request 
Jean le Rond D'Alembert (1717-83) undertook the 
direction of the mathematical articles, and wrote the 
Discours Preliminaire, which classified the departments 
of human knowledge on the basis of Bacon's concep- 
tions, and gave a survey of intellectual progress. It was 
welcomed with warm applause. The aid of Voltaire, 
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Buffon, Turgot, Quesnay, and 
a host of less illustrious writers was secured ; but the 
vast enterprise excited the alarms of the ecclesiastical 
party; the Jesuits were active in rivalry and opposition ; 
Rousseau deserted and became an enemy ; D'Alembert, 
• timid, and a lover of peace, withdrew. In 1759 the 
privilege of publication was revoked, but the Govern- 
ment did not enforce its own decree. Through all 
difficulties and dangers Diderot held his ground. One 






296 FRENCH LITERATURE 

day he wrote a fragment of the history of philosophy ; 
the next he was in a workshop examining the con- 
struction of some machine : nothing was too great 
or too small for his audacity or his patience. To 
achieve the work, tact was needed as well as courage ; 
at times he condescended to disguise his real opinions, 
striving to weather the storm by yielding to it. In 1765 
his gigantic labours were substantially accomplished, 
though the last plates of the Encyclopedie were not issued 
until 1772. When all was finished, the scientific move- 
ment of the century was methodised and popularised; 
a barrier against the invasion of the past was erected; 
the rationalist philosophy, with all its truths and all its 
errors, its knowledge and its ignorance, had obtained its 
Suvnna. 

But, besides this co-operative work, Diderot did much, 
and in many directions, single-handed, flinging out his 
thoughts with ardent haste, and often leaving what he 
had written to the mercies of chance ; a prodigal sower 
of good and evil seed. Several of his most remarkable 
pieces came to light, as it were, by accident, and long 
after his death. His novel -La Religieuse — influenced 
to some extent by Richardson, whom he supersti- 
tiously admired — is a repulsive exposure of conventual 
life as it appeared to him, and of its moral disorder. 
Jacques le Fataliste, in which the manner is coarsely 
imitated from Sterne, a book ill- composed and often 
malodorous, contains, among- its heterogeneous tales, one 
celebrated narrative, the Histoire de Mme. de la Pom- 
meraye, relating a woman's base revenge on a faithless, 
lover. If anything of Diderot's can be named a master- 
piece, it is certainly Le Neveit de Rameau, a satire and 
a character-study of the parasite, thrown into the form 



DIDEROT AS A CRITIC 297 

of dialogue, which he handled with brilliant success ; 
it remained unknown until the appearance of a German 
version (1805), made by Goethe from a manuscript 
copy. 

In his Salons ; Diderot elevated and enlarged the criti- 
cism of the pictorial art in France. His eye for colour 
and for contour was admirable ; but it is less the 
technique of paintings that he studies than the sub- 
jects, the ideas, and the moral significance. Such 
criticism may be condemned as literary rather than 
artistic ; it was, however, new and instructive, and did 
much to quicken the public taste. Diderot pleaded 
for a return to nature in the theatre ; for a bourgeois 
drama, domestic tragedy and serious comedy, touched 
with pathos, studied from real life, and inspired by a 
moral purpose ; for the presentation on the stage of 
"conditions" rather than individual types — that is, of 
character as modified by social environments and the 
habits which they produce. He maintained that the 
actor should rather possess than be possessed by his 
theme, should be the master rather than the slave of 
his sensibility. 

The examples of dramatic art which Diderot gave in 
his own plays, the Pere de Famille and the Fils Naturel, 
are poor affectations of a style supposed to be natural, 
and are patently doctrinaire in their design, laboured 
developments of a moral thesis. One piece in which 
he paints himself, Est-il bon ? Est-il mediant ? and this 
alone, falls little short of being admirable, and yet it 
fails of true success. 

A coherent system of thought cannot be found in 
Diderot's writings, but they are pregnant with ideas. 
He is deist, pantheist, atheist , he is a materialist — one, 



298 FRENCH LITERATURE 

however, who conceives matter not as inert, but quick 
with force. He is edifying and sincere in his morality; 
and presently his morals become the doctrines of an 
anarchical licence. All the ideas of his age struggle 
within him, and are never reduced to unity or har- 
mony ; light is never separate in his nature from heat, 
and light and warmth together give rise to thoughts 
which are sometimes the anticipations of scientific 
genius ; he almost leaps forward to some of the con- 
clusions of Darwin. His great powers and his inces- 
sant energy were not directed to worldly prosperity. 
Diderot was never rich. The Empress Catherine of 
Russia magnificently purchased his library, and en- 
trusted him with the books, as her librarian, providing 
a salary which to him was wealth. He travelled to St. 
Petersburg to thank her in person for her generous 
and delicate gift. But her imperial generosity was not 
greater than his own ; he was always ready to lavish 
the treasures of his knowledge and thought in the 
service of others ; no small fragment of his work was 
a free gift to his friends, and passed under their name ; 
Holbach and Raynal were among his debtors. 

His correspondence presents a vivid image of the man 
and of the group of philosophers to which he belonged ; 
the letters addressed to Mdlle. Volland, to whom he was 
devotedly attached during many years, are frank be- 
trayals of his character and his life. Her loss saddened 
his last days, but the days of sorrow were few. In 
July 1784, Diderot died. His reputation and influence 
were from time to time enhanced by posthumous pub- 
lications. Other writers of his century impressed their 
own personalities more distinctly and powerfully upon 
society ; no other writer mingled his genius so com- 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT 299 

pletely with external things, or responded so fully and 
variously to the stimulus of the spirit of his age. 



II 

The French philosophical movement — the " Illumina- 
tion " — of the eighteenth century, proceeds in part from 
the empiricism of Locke, in part from the remarkable 
development of physical and natural science ; it incor- 
porated the conclusions of English deism, and advanced 
from deism to atheism. An intellectual centre for the 
movement was provided by the Encyclopedic ; a social 
centre was found in Parisian salons. It was sustained 
and invigorated by the passion for freedom and for 
justice asserting itself against the despotism and abuses 
of government and against the oppressions and abuses 
of the Church. The opposing forces were feeble, incom- 
petent, disorganised. The methods of government were, 
in truth, indefensible ; religion had surrendered dogma, 
and lost the austerity of morals ; within the citadel of 
the Church were many professed and many secret allies 
of the philosophers. 

While in England an apologetic literature arose, pro- 
found in thought and adequate in learning, in France no 
sustained resistance was offered to the inroad of free 
thought. Episcopal fulminations rolled like stage thun- 
der; the Bastille and Vincennes were holiday retreats 
for fatigued combatants ; imprisonment was tempered 
with cajoleries ; the censors of the press connived with 
their victims. The Chancellor d'Aguesseau (1668-1751), 
an estimable magistrate, a dignified orator, maintained 
the old seriousness of life and morals, and received the 



300 FRENCH LITERATURE 

reward of exile. The good ROLLIN (1661-1741) dictated 
lessons to youth drawn from antiquity and Christianity, 
narrated ancient history, and discoursed admirably on a 
plan of studies with a view to form the heart and mind ; 
an amiable Christian Nestor, he was not a man-at-arms. 
The Abbe Guenee replied to Voltaire with judgment, 
wit, and erudition, in his Lettres de quelques Juifs (1769), 
but it was a single victory in a campaign of many battles. 
The satire of Gilbert, Le Dix-huitieme Siede, is rudely 
vigorous ; but Gilbert was only an angry youth, disap- 
pointed of his fame. Freron, the " Wasp " {frelon) of 
Voltaire's V j&cossaise, might sting in his Anne'e Litteraire, 
but there were sharper stings in satire and epigram 
which he must endure. Palissot might amuse the thea- 
trical spectators of 1760 with his ridiculous philosophers; 
the Philosophes was taken smilingly by Voltaire, and was 
sufficiently answered by Morellet's pamphlet 1 nd the 
bouts-rimes of Marmontel or Piron. The Voitairomanie 
of Desfontaines is only the outbreak of resentment of 
the accomplished and disreputable Abbe against a bene- 
factor whose offence jwas to have saved him from the 
galleys. 

The sensationalist philosophy is inaugurated by JULIEN 
Offray de La Mettrie (1709-51) rather than by Con- 
dillac. A physician, making observations on his own 
case during an attack of fever, he arrived at the con- 
clusion that thought is but a result of the mechanism 
of the body. Man is a machine more ingeniously 
organised than the brute. All ideas have their origin 
in sensation. As for morals, they are not absolute, but 
relative to society and the State. As for God, perhaps 
He exists, but why should we worship this existence 
more than any other ? The law of our being is to 



THE SENSATIONALIST SCHOOL 301 

seek happiness ; the law of society is that we should 
not interfere with the happiness of others. The pleasure 
of the senses is not the only pleasure, but it has the 
distinction of being universal to our species. 

La Metlrie, while opposing the spiritualism of Des- 
cartes, is more closely connected with that great thinker, 
through his doctrine that brutes are but machines, than 
with Locke. It is from Locke — though from Locke muti- 
lated—that Etiexxe Bonxot de Coxdillac (1715-80) 
proceeds. All ideas are sensations, but sensations trans- 
formed. Imagine a marble statue endowed successively 
with the several human senses ; it will be seen how 
perceptions, consciousness, memory, ideas, comparison, 
judgment, association, abstraction, pleasure, desire are 
developed. The ego is but the bundle of sensations 
experienced or transformed and held in recollection. 
Yet the unity of the ego seems to argue that it is not 
composed of material particles. Condillac's doctrine is 
sensationalist, but not materialistic. Condillac's disciple, 
the physician Cabanis (1757-1808), proceeded to investi- 
gate the nature of sensibility itself, and to develop the 
physiological method of psychology. The unnecessary 
soul which Condillac preserved was suppressed by 
Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) ; his ideology was no 
more than a province of zoology. 

The morals of the sensationalist school were expressed 
by Claude-Adriex Helvetius (1715-71), a worthy 
and benevolent farmer-general. The motive of all our 
actions is self-love, that tendency which leads us to seek 
for pleasure and avoid pain ; but, by education and 
legislation, self-love can be guided and trained so that 
it shall harmonise with the public good. It remained 
for a German acclimatised to Paris to compile the full 



302 FRENCH LITERATURE 

manifesto of atheistic materialism. At Holbach's hos- 
pitable table the philosophers met, and the air was 
charged with ideas. To condense these into a system 
was Holbach's task. Diderot, Lagrange, Naigeon may 
have lent their assistance, but Paul- Henry Thiry, 
Baron d'Holbach (1723-89) must be regarded as sub- 
stantially the author of the Systeme dc la Nature (1770), 
which the title-page prudently attributed to the deceased 
Mirabaud. What do we desire but that men should be 
happy, just, benevolent ? That they may become so, it 
is necessary to deliver them from those errors on which 
political and spiritual despotism is founded, from the 
chains of tyrants and the chimeras of priests, and to 
lead them back from illusions to nature, of which man 
is a part. We find everywhere matter and motion, a 
chain of material causes and effects, nor can w T e find 
aught beside these. An ever - circulating system of 
motions connects inorganic and organic nature, fire 
and air and piant and animal ; free-will is as much 
excluded as God and His miraculous providence. The 
soul is nothing but the brain receiving and transmitting 
motions ; morals form a department of physiology. 
Religions and governments, as they exist, are based on 
error, and drive men into crime. But though Holbach 
" accommodated atheism," as Grimm puts it, " to cham- 
bermaids and hairdressers," he would not hurry forward 
a revolution. All will come in good time ; in some 
happier day Nature and her daughters Virtue, Reason, 
and Truth will alone receive the adoration of mankind. 1 
Among the friends of Holbach and Helvetius was 

1 The Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (1720-93) endeavoured to recon- 
cile his sensationalism with a religious faith and a private interpretation of 
Christianity. 



VOLNEY: CONDORCET 303 

C.-F. de Chasseboeuf, Count de Volney (1757-1S20), 
who modified and developed the ethics of Helvetius. 
An Orientalist by his studies, he travelled in Egypt and 
Syria, desiring to investigate the origins of ancient reli- 
gions, and reported what he had seen in colourless but 
exact description. In Les Ruines, ou Meditations sur les 
Revolutions des Empires, he recalls the past like " an Arab 
Ossian," monotonous and grandiose, and expounds the 
history of humanity with cold and superficial analysis 
clothed in a pomp of words. His faith in human 
progress, founded on nature, reason, and justice, sus- 
tained Volney during the rise and fall of the Girondin 
party. 

A higher and nobler spirit, who perished in the Revolu- 
tion, but ceased not till his last moment to hope and 
labour for the good of men, was J.-A.-N. de Caritat, 
Marquis de CONDORCET (^743-94). Illustrious in mathe- 
matical science, he was interested by Turgot in political 
economy, and took a part in the polemics of theology. 
While lying concealed from the emissaries of Robespierre 
he wrote his Esquisse dun Tableau Historique des Progres 
de FEsprit Humain. It is a philosophy of the past, and 
almost a hymn in honour of human perfectibility. The 
man-statue of Condillac, receiving, retaining, distinguish- 
ing, and combining sensations, has gradually developed, 
through nine successive epochs, from that of the hunter 
and fisher to the citizen of 1789, who comprehends the 
physical universe with Newton, human nature with Locke 
and Condillac, and society with Turgot and Rousseau. In 
the vision of the future, with its progress in knowledge 
and in morals, its individual and social improvement, its 
lessening inequalities between nations and classes, the 
philosopher finds his consolation for all the calamities of 



304 FRENCH LITERATURE 

the present age. Condorcet died in prison, poisoned, it 
is believed ; by his own hand. 

The economists, or, as Dupont de Nemours named 
them, the physiocrats, formed a not unimportant wing 
of the philosophic phalanx, now in harmony with the 
Encyclopaedic party, now in hostility. The sense of th-j 
misery of France was present to many minds in the 
opening of the century, and with the death of Louis 
XIV. came illusive hopes of amelioration. The Abbe 
de Saint-Pierre (1658- 1743), filled with ardent zeal for 
human happiness, condemned the government of the 
departed Grand Monarch, and dreamed of a perpetual 
peace ; among his dreams arose projects for the im- 
provement of society which were justified by time. Bois- 
guiilebert, and Vauban, marshal of France and military 
engineer, were no visionary spirits ; they pleaded for a 
serious consideration of the general welfare, and espe- 
cially the welfare of the agricultural class, the wealth- 
producers of the community. To violate economic laws, 
Boisguillebert declared, is to violate nature ; let govern- 
ments restrain their meddling, and permit natural forces 
to operate with freedom. 

Such was the doctrine of the physiocratic school, of 
which Francois Quesnay (1694-1774) was the chief. 
Let human institutions conform to nature ; enlarge the 
bounds of freedom ; give play to the spirit of individual- 
ism ; diminish the interference of government — " laissez. 
faire, laissez passer." 1 Agriculture is productive, let its 
burdens be alleviated ; manufactures are useful but 
" sterile " : honour, therefore, above all, to the tiller of the 

1 This phrase had been used by Boisguillebert and by the Marquis d'Ar-. 
genson before Gournay made it a power. On D'Argenson (1694-1757), whose 
Considerations surh Gonvernement de la France were not published until 1764, 
cce the study by Mr. Arthur Ogle (1893). 



THE PHYSIOCRATS 305 

fields, who hugs nature close, and who enriches human- 
kind ! The elder Mirabeau — "ami des hommes" — 
who had anticipated Quesnay in some of his views, and 
himself had learnt from Cantillon, met Quesnay in 1757, 
and thenceforth subordinated his own fiery spirit, as far 
as that was possible, to the spirit of the master. From the 
physiocrats — Gournay and Quesnay — the noble-minded 
and illustrious Turgot (1727-81) derived many of those 
ideas of reform which he endeavoured to put into 
action when intendant of Limoges, and later, when 
Minister of Finance. By his Reflexions sur la Formation 
et la Distribution des Richcsses, Turgot prepared the way 
for Adam Smith. 

In 1770 the Abbe Galiani, as alert of brain as he was 
diminutive of stature, attacked the physiocratic doctrines 
in his Dialogues sur le Commerce des Dies, which Plato and 
Moliere — so Voltaire pronounced — had combined to 
write. The refutation of the Dialogues by Morellet was 
the result of no such brilliant collaboration, and Galiani, 
proposed that his own unstatuesque person should be 
honoured by a statue above an inscription, declaring 
that he had wiped out the economists, who were sending 
the nation to sleep. The fame of his Dialogues was 
perhaps in large measure due to the party-spirit of the 
Encyclopaedists, animated by a vivacious attack upon 
the physiocrats. The book was applauded, but reached 
no second edition. 

An important body of articles on literature was 
contributed to the Encyclopedic by Jean - FRANCOIS 
Marmontel. As early as 17 19 a remarkable study 
in aesthetics had appeared — the Reflexions Critiques sur 
la Poc'sie et la Peinture, by the Abbe Dubos. Art is 
conceived as a satisfaction of the craving for vivid 



306 FRENCH LITERATURE 

sensations and emotions apart from the painful con- 
sequences which commonly attend these in actual 
life. That portion of Dubos' work which treats of 
" physical causes in the progress of art and literature," 
anticipates the views of Montesquieu on the influence of 
climate, and studies the action of environment on the 
products of the imagination. In 1746 Charles Batteux, 
in his treatise Les Beaux-Arts reduits a un mime Principe, 
defined the end of art as the imitation of nature — not 
indeed of reality, but of nature in its actual or possible 
beauty ; of nature not as it is, but as it may be. The 
articles of Marmontel, revised and collected in the six 
volumes of his Elements de Litterature (1787), were full 
of instruction for his own time, delicate and just in 
observation, as they often were, if not penetrating or 
profound. In his earlier Poetique Francaise — "a petard," 
said Mairan, " laid at the doors of the Academy to blow 
them up if they should not open " — he had shown him- 
self strangely disrespectful towards the fame of Racine, 
Boileau, and the poet Rousseau. 

The friend of Marmontel, Antoine-Leonard Thomas 
(1732-85), honourably distinguished by the dignity of 
his character and conduct, a composer of E\loges on 
great men, somewhat marred by strain and oratorical 
emphasis, put his best work into an Essai sur les 
Eloges. At a time when Bossuet was esteemed below 
his great deserts, Thomas — almost alone — recognised his 
supremacy in eloquence. As the century advanced, and 
philosophy developed its attack on religion and govern- 
ments, the classical tradition in literature not only 
remained unshaken, but seemed to gain in authority. 
The first lieutenant of Voltaire, his literary "son," 
Laharpe (1739-1803) represents the critical temper of 



LAHARPE: GRIMM 307 

the time. In 1786 he began his courses of lectures at 
the Lycee, before a brilliant audience composed of 
both sexes. For the first time in France, instruction 
in literature, not trivial and not erudite, but suited to 
persons of general culture, was made an intellectual 
pleasure. For the first time the history of literature 
was treated, in its sequence from Homer to modern 
times, as a totality. Laharpe's judgments of his con- 
temporaries were often misled by his bitterness of 
spirit ; his mind was not capacious, his sympathies were 
not liberal ; his knowledge, especially of Greek letters, 
was defective. But he knew the great age of Louis XIV., 
and he felt the beauty of its art. No one has written 
with finer intelligence of Racine than he in his Lycee, oil 
Cours de Litterature. As the Revolution approached he 
sympathised with its hopes and fears ; the professor 
donned the bonnet rouge. The storm which burst 
silenced his voice for a time ; in 1793 he suffered im- 
prisonment ; and when he occupied his chair again, 
it was a converted Laharpe who declaimed against 
philosophers, republicans, and atheists, the tyrants of 
reason, morals, art and letters. 

The finest and surest judgment in contemporary litera- 
ture was that of a gallicised German — Melchior Grimm 
(1723-1807). As Laharpe was bound in filial loyalty to 
Voltaire, so Grimm was in fraternal attachment to the 
least French of eighteenth-century French authors — ■ 
Diderot. From a basis of character in which there was 
a measure of Teutonic enthusiasm and romance, his 
intellect rose clear, light, and sure, with no mists of sen- 
timent about it, and no clouds of fancy. During thirty- 
I seven years, as a kind of private journalist, he furnished 



308 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Poland, with " Correspondence," which reflected as from 
a mirror all the lights of Paris to the remote North and 
East. His own philosophy, his political views, were 
cheerless and arid ; but he could judge the work of 
others generously as well as severely. No one of his 
generation so intelligently appreciated Shakespeare ; no 
one more happily interpreted Montaigne. By swift 
apercn, by criticism, by anecdote, by caustic raillery, or 
serious record, he makes the intellectual world of his 
day pass before us and expound its meanings. The 
Revolution, the dangers of which he divined early, 
drove him from Paris. In bidding it farewell he wished 
that he were in his grave. 



Ill 

Buffon, whose power ©f wing was great, and who did 
not love the heat and dust of combat, soared smoothly 
above the philosophic strife. Born in 1707, at Mont- 
bard, in Burgundy, George - Louis Leclerc, created 
Comte de Buffon by Louis XV., fortunate in the 
possession of riches, health, and serenity of heart and 
brain, lived in his domestic circle, apart from the coteries 
of Paris, pursuing with dignity and infinite patience his 
proper ends. The legend describes him as a pompous 
Olympian even in his home ; in truth, if he was 
majestic — like a marshal of France, as Hume describes 
him — he was also natural, genial, and at times gay. His 
appointment, in 1739, as intendant of the Royal Garden, 
now the Jardin des Plantes, turned his studies from 
mathematical science to natural history. 

The first volumes of his vast Histoire Naturelle ap- 



BUFFON 309 

peared in 1749 ; aided by Daubenton and others, he 
was occupied with the succeeding volumes during forty 
years, until death terminated his labours in 1788. The 
defects of his work are obvious — its want of method, 
its disdain of classification, its abuse of hypotheses, its 
humanising of the animal world, its pomp of style. But 
the progress of science, which lowered the reputation 
of Buffon, has again re-established his fame. Not a few 
of his disdained hypotheses are seen to have been the 
divinations of genius ; and if he wrote often in the 
ornate, classical manner, he could also write with a 
grave simplicity. 

In his Discours de Reception, pronounced before the 
French Academy in 1753, he formulated his doctrine of 
literary style, insisting that it is, before all- else, the mani- 
festation of order in the evolution of ideas ; ideas alone 
form the basis and inward substance of style. Rejecting 
merely abstract conceptions as an explanation of natural 
phenomena, viewing classifications as no more than a 
convenience of the human intellect, refusing to regard 
final causes as a subject of science, he envisaged nature 
with a tranquil and comprehensive gaze, and with some- 
thing of a poet's imagination. He perceived that the 
globe, in its actual condition, is the result of a long 
series of changes, and thereby he gave an impulse to 
sound geological study ; he expounded the geography 
of species, and almost divined the theory of their trans- 
formation or variability ; he recognised in some degree 
the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest; 
he regarded man as a part of nature, but as its noblest 
part, capable of an intellectual and moral progress which 
is not the mere result of physical laws. 

Whatever may have been Buffon's errors as a thinker, 



310 FRENCH LITERATURE 

he enlarged the bounds of literature by annexing the 
province of natural history as Montesquieu had annexed 
that of political science. His vision of the universe was 
unclouded by passion, and part of its grandeur is derived 
from this serenity. He studied and speculated with 
absolute freedom, prepared to advance from his own 
ideas to others more in accordance with observed pheno- 
mena. " He desired to be," writes a critic, " and almost 
became, a pure intelligence in presence of eternal things.'"' 
How could he concern himself with the strifes and passions 
of a day to whom the centuries were moments in the 
vast process of evolving change ? In Andre Chenier he 
found a disciple who would fain have been the Lucretius 
of the new svstem of nature. 



CHAPTER IV 

ROUSSEAU— BE AUMARCHAIS— BERNARDIN DE 
SAINT-PIERRE— ANDRE CHENIER 

'I 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau the man is inseparable from 
Rousseau the writer ; his works proceed directly from 
his character and his life. Born at Geneva in 1712, he 
died at Ermenonville in 1778. His childhood was fol- 
lowed by years of vagabondage. From 1732, the date of 
his third residence with Madame de Warens, until 1741, 
though his vagabondage did not wholly cease, he was 
collecting his powers and educating his mind with studies 
ardently pursued. During nine subsequent years in 
Paris, in Venice, and elsewhere, he was working his way 
towards the light ; it was the period of his gayer writings, 
ballet, opera, comedy, and of the articles on music con- 
tributed to the Encyclopedic-: he had not yet begun to 
preach and prophesy to his age. The great fourth period 
of his life, from 1749 to 1762, includes all his master- 
pieces except the Confessions. From 1762 until his death, 
while his temper grew darker and his reason was dis- 
turbed, Rousseau was occupied with apologetic and 
autobiographic writings. 

His mother died in giving birth to Jean-Jacques. His 
father, a watchmaker, rilled the child's head with the 



312 FRENCH LITERATURE 

follies of romances, which they read together, and gave 
him through Plutarch's Lives a sense of the exaltations 
of virtue. The boy's feeling for nature was quickened 
and fostered in the garden of the pastor of Bossey. From 
a notary's office, where he seemed an incapable fool, he 
passed under the harsh rule of an engraver of watches, 
learning the vices that grow from fear. At sixteen he 
fled, and found protection at Annecy, under Madame de 
Warens, a young and comely lady, recently converted 
to the Roman communion, frank, kind, gay, and as 
devoid of moral principles as*any creature in the Natural 
History. Sent to Turin for instruction, Rousseau re- 
nounced his Protestant faith, and soon after found in 
the good Abbe Gaime the model in part of his Savoyard 
vicar. Some experience of domestic service was fol- 
lowed by a year at Annecy, during which Rousseau's 
talent as a musician was developed. From eighteen to 
twenty he led a wandering life — "starved, feasted, de- 
spaired, was happy." Rejoining Madame de Warens 
at Chambery in 1732, he interested himself in music, 
physics, botany, and was more and more drawn to- 
wards the study of letters. He methodised his reading 
(1738-4:), and passionately pursued a liberal system of 
self-education, literary, scientific, and philosophical. 

Rousseau's relations with his bonne maman, Madame de 
Warens, had been troubled by the latest of her other loves. 
In 1 741 he set off for Paris, bearing with him the manu- 
script of a new system of musical notation, which was 
offered to the Academie des Sciences, and was declared 
neither new nor useful for instrumentalists. An experi- 
ment in life as secretary to the French Ambassador at 
Venice closed, after fourteen months, with his abrupt dis- 
missal. Again in Paris, Rousseau obtained celebrity by 



ROUSSEAU'S EARLY WRITINGS 313 

his operas and comedies, was received in the salons, and 
associated joyously with Diderot, Marmontel, and Grimm. 
He arranged his domestic life by taking an illiterate and 
vulgar drudge, Therese Le Vasseur, for his companion ; 
their children were abandoned to the care of the Found- 
ling Hospital. 

In 1749 Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes. Rous- 
seau, on the road to visit his friend, read in the Mercure 
de France that the Academy of Dijon had proposed as 
the subject for a prize to be awarded next year the ques- 
tion, " Has the progress of arts and sciences contributed 
to purify morals ? " Suddenly a tumult of ideas arose in 
his brain and overwhelmed him ; it was an ecstasy of the 
intellect and the passions. With Diderot's encourage- 
ment he undertook his indictment of civilisation; in 1750 
the Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts was crowned. In 
accordance with his theory he proceeded to simplify his 
own life, intensifying his self-consciousness by singu- 
larities of assumed austerity, and playing the part (not 
wholly a fictitious one) of a moral reformer. Famous 
as author of the Discours and the opera Le Devin de 
Village, presented before the King, he returned to his 
native Switzerland, and there re-entered the Protestant 
communion. In 1754 he again competed for a prize 
at Dijon, on the question, "What is the origin of in- 
equality among men, and is it authorised by the law of 
nature ? " Rousseau failed to obtain the prize, but the 
Discours sur P Inegalite was published (1755) W1 ^ a 
dedication to the Republic of Geneva. He had dis- 
covered in private property the source of all the evils 
of society. 

In Switzerland Rousseau prepared a first redaction of 
his political treatise, the Contrat Social, and rilled his 



3 i4 FRENCH LITERATURE 

heart with the beauty of those prospects which form an 
environment for the lovers in his Heloise. In 1756 he was 
established, through the kindness of Madame d'Epinay, 
in the Hermitage, near the borders of the forest of Mont- 
morency. His delight in the woods and fields was great; 
his delight in Madame d'Houdetot, kinswoman of his 
hostess, was a more troubled passion. Quarrels with 
Madame d'Epinay, quarrels with Grimm and Diderot, 
estrangement from Madame d'Houdetot, closed the scene 
at the Hermitage. 

Authorship, however, had its joys and consolations. 
The Lettre a D ' Alembert, a censure of the theatre (1758), 
was succeeded by La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), by the 
Contrat Social (1762), and Amile (1762). The days at 
Montmorency which followed his departure from the 
Hermitage passed in calm. With the publication of 
limile the storms began again. The book, condemned 
by the Sorbonne, was ordered by the Parliament to be 
burnt by the common executioner. Rousseau escaped 
imprisonment by flight. In Switzerland he could not 
settle near Voltaire. A champion for the doctrine of a 
providential order of the world, an enemy of the stage — 
especially in republican Geneva — Rousseau had flung 
indignant words against Voltaire, and Voltaire had tossed 
back words of bitter scorn. Geneva had followed Paris 
in its hostility towards Rousseau's recent publications ; 
whose doing could it be except Voltaire's ? He fled from 
his persecutors to Motiers, where the King of Prussia's 
governor afforded him protection. Renewed quarrels 
with his countrymen, clerical intolerance, mob violence, 
an envenomed pamphlet from Voltaire, once more drove 
him forth. He took refuge on an island in the lake of 
Bienne, only to be expelled by the authorities of Berne. 



ROUSSEAU'S CHARACTER 315 

Encouraged by Hume — " le bon David " — he arrived in 
January 1766 in London. 

At Wootton, in the Peak of Derbyshire, Rousseau pre- 
pared the first five books of his Confessions. Within a little 
time he had assured himself that Hume was joined with 
D Alembert and Voltaire in a triumvirate of persecutors 
to defame his character and render him an outcast ; the 
whole human race had conspired to destroy him. Again 
Rousseau fled, sojourned a year at Trye-Chateau under 
an assumed name, and after wanderings hither and 
thither, took refuge in Paris, where, living meanly, he 
completed his Confessions, wrote other eloquent pieces 
of self-vindication, and relieved his morbid cerebral 
excitement by music and botanising rambles. The hos- 
pitality of M. de Girardin at Ermenonville was gladly 
accepted in May 1778 ; and there, on July 2, he suddenly 
died ; suicide was surmised ; the seizure was probably 
apoplectic. 

Rousseau was essentially an idealist, but an idealist 
whose dreams and visions were inspired by the play 
of his sensibility upon his intellect and imagination, 
and therefore he was the least impersonal of thinkers. 
Generous of heart, he was filled with bitter suspicions; 
inordinately proud, he nursed his pride amid sordid 
realities; cherishing ideals of purity and innocence, he 
sank deep in the mire of imaginative sensuality; effemi- 
nate, he was also indomitable ; an uncompromising opti- 
mist, he saw the whole world lying in wickedness ; a 
passionate lover of freedom, he aimed at establishing 
the most unqualified of tyrannies ; among the devout 
he was a free-thinker, among the philosophers he was the 
sentimentalist of theopathy. He stands apart from his 
contemporaries : they did homage to the understand- 



3i6 FRENCH LITERATURE 

ing; he was the devotee of the heart: they belonged 
to a brilliant society; he was elated, suffered, brooded, 
dreamed in solitude : they were aristocratic, at least 
by virtue of the intellectual culture which they repre T 
sented ; he was plebeian in his origin,* and popular in 
his sympathies. 

He became a great writer comparatively late in life, 
under the compulsion of a ruling idea which lies at the 
centre of all his more important works, excepting such 
as are apologetic and autobiographical : Nature has 
made man good and happy ; society has made him evil 
and miserable. Are we, then, to return to a state of 
primitive savagery ? No : society cannot retrograde. 
But in many ways we can ameliorate human life by 
approximating to a natural condition. 

In the Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts, the Disconrs 
sur r Inegalite, and the Lettre a U Alembert sur les Spec- 
tacles, Rousseau pleads against the vices, the artificiality, 
the insincerities, the luxuries, the false refinements, the 
factitious passions, the dishonest pleasures of modern 
society. "You make one wish," wrote Voltaire, "to 
walk on all fours." By nature all men are born free 
and equal ; society has rendered them slaves, and im- 
pounded them in classes of rich and poor, powerful and 
weak, master and servant, peasant and peer. Rousseau's 
conception of the primitive state of nature, and the origin 
of society by a contract, may not be historically exact — 
his he admits ; nevertheless, it serves well, he urges, as 
i working hypothesis to explain the present state of 
things, and to point the way to a happier state. It 
exhibits property as the confiscation of natural rights ; 
it justifies the sacred cause of insurrection ; it teaches 
us to honour man as man, and the simple citizen more 



THE CONTRAT SOCIAL 317 

than the noble, the scientific student, or the artist. Plain 
morals are the only safe morals. We are told that the 
theatre is a school of manners, purifying the passions ; 
on the contrary, it irritates and perverts them ; or it 
offers to ridicule the man of straightforward virtue, as 
Moliere was not ashamed to do in his Misanthrope. 

Having developed his destructive criticism against 
society as it is, Rousseau would build up. In the Contra t 
Soda I he would show how freedom and government may 
be conciliated ; how, through the arrangements of society, 
man may in a certain sense return to the law of nature. 
" Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains ; " yet 
social order, Rousseau declares, is sacred. Having re- 
signed his individual liberty by the social pact, how may 
man recover that liberty ? By yielding his individual 
rights absolutely to a self-governing community of which 
he forms a part. The volonte generate, expressing itself 
by a plurality of votes, resumes the free-will of every 
individual. If any person should resist the general will, 
he thereby sacrifices his true freedom, and he must be 
" forced to be free." Thus the dogma of the sovereignty 
of the people is formulated by Rousseau. Government 
is merely a delegation of power made by the people as 
sovereign for the uses of the people as subjects. In 
Rousseau's system, if the tyranny of the majority 
be established without check or qualification, at least 
equality is secured, for, in the presence of the sove- 
reign people and its manifested will, each individual is 
reduced to the level of all his fellows. 

La Nouvelle Heloise, in the form of a romance, con- 
siders the purification of domestic manners. Richard- 
son's novels are followed in the epistolary style of 
narration, which lends itself to the exposition of senti- 



I 



3'i8 FRENCH LITERATURE 

ment. The story is simple in its incidents. Saint- 
Preux's crime of passion against his pupil Julie 
resembles that of Abelard against Eloisa. Julie, like 
Eloisa, has been a consenting party. Obedient to her 
father's will, Julie marries Wolmar. In despair Saint- 
Preux wanders abroad. Wolmar offers him his friend- 
ship and a home. The lovers meet, are tried, and do 
not yield to the temptation. Julie dies a victim to her 
maternal devotion, and not too soon — "Another day, 
perhaps, and I were guilty ! " 

In 1757 Rousseau conceived the design of his romance. 
It might have been coldly edifying had not the writer's 
consuming passion for Madame d'Houdetot, awakening 
all that he had felt as the lover of Madame de Warens, 
filled it with intensity of ardour. In the first part of the 
romance, passion asserts the primitive rights of nature ; 
in the second part, those rights are shown to be no longer 
rights in an organised society. But the ideal of domestic 
life exhibited is one far removed from the artificialities 
of the world of fashion : it is a life of plain duties, patri- 
archal manners, and gracious beneficence. Rousseau 
the moralist is present to rebuke Rousseau the senti- 
mentalist ; yet the sentimentalist has his own persuasive 
power. The emotion of the lovers is reinforced by the 
penetrating influences of the beauty of external nature ; 
and both are interpreted with incomparable harmonies 
of style and poignant lyrical cries, in which the violin 
note outsoars the orchestra. 

A reform of domestic life must result in a reform of 
education. Rousseau's ideal of education, capable of 
adaptations and modifications according to circumstances, 
is presented in his Entile. How shall a child be formed 
in accordance, not with the vicious code of an artificial 



ROUSSEAU ON EDUCATION 319 

society, but in harmony with nature ? Rousseau traces 
the course of Emile's development from birth to adult 
years. Unconstrained by swaddling-bands, suckled by 
his mother, the child enjoys the freedom of nature, and 
at five years old passes into the care of his father or 
his tutor. During the earlier years his education is to 
be negative : let him be preserved from all that is false 
or artificial, and enter upon the heritage of childhood, 
the gladness of animal life, vigorous delights in sun- 
shine and open air ; at twelve he will hardly have 
opened a book, but he will have been in vital relation 
with real things, he will unconsciously have laid the 
foundations of wisdom. When the time for study 
comes, that study should be simple and sound — no 
Babel of words, but a wholesome knowledge of things ; 
he may have learnt little, but he will know that little 
aright ; a sunrise will be his first lesson in cosmography ; 
he may watch the workman in his workshop ; he may 
practise the carpenter's trade ; he may read Robin- 
son Crusoe, and learn the lesson of self-help. Let him 
ask at every moment, " What is the good of this ? " 
Unpuzzled by questions of morals, metaphysics, history, 
he will have grown up laborious, temperate, patient, 
firm, courageous. 

At fifteen the passions are awake ; let them be gently 
and wisely guided. Let pity, gratitude, benevolence be 
formed within the boy's heart, so that the self-regarding 
passions may fall into a subordinate place. To read 
Plutarch is to commune with noble spirits ; to read 
Thucydides is almost to come into immediate contact 
with facts. The fables of La Fontaine will serve as a 
criticism of the errors of the passions. 

And now Emile, at eighteen, may learn the sublime 



3 20 FRENCH LITERATURE 

mysteries of that faith which is professed by Rousseau's 
Savoyard vicar. A Will moves the universe and animates 
nature ; that Will, acting through general laws, is guided 
by supreme intelligence ; if the order of Providence be 
disturbed, it is only through the abuse of man's free- 
will ; the soul is immaterial and survives the body ; con- 
science is the voice of God within the soul ; " dare to 
confess God before the philosophers, dare to preach 
humanity before the intolerant ; " God demands no other 
worship than that of the heart. With such a preparation 
r.j this, Emile may at length proceed to aesthetic culture, 
arid find his chief delight in those writers whose genius 
has the closest kinship to nature. Finally, in Sophie, 
formed to be the amiable companion and helpmate of 
man, Emile should find a resting-place for his heart. 
Alas, if she should ever betray his confidence ! 

The Confessions, with its sequels in the Dialogues, ou 
Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, and the Reveries du Pro- 
meneur Solitaire, constitute an autobiographical romance. 
The sombre colours of the last six Books throw out the 
livelier lights and shades of the preceding Books. While 
often falsifying facts and dates, Rousseau writes with all 
the sincerity of one who was capable of boundless self- 
deception. He will reserve no record of shame and vice 
and humiliation, confident that in the end he must appear 
the most virtuous of men. As the utterance of a soul 
touched and thrilled by all the influences of nature and 
of human life, the Confessions affects the reader like a 
musical symphony in which various movements are in- 
terpreted by stringed and breathing instruments. If 
Rousseau here is less of the prophet than in his other 
writings, he is more of the great enchanter. Should a 
moral be drawn from the book, the author would have 



INFLUENCE OF ROUSSEAU 321 

us learn that nature has made man good, that society 
has the skill to corrupt him, and finally that it is in his 
power to refashion himself to such virtue as the world 
most needs and most impatiently rejects. 

The influence of Rousseau cannot easily be over-esti- 
mated. He restored the sentiment of religion in an age 
of abstract deism or turbid materialism. He inaugurated 
a moral reform. He tyrannised over France in the 
person of his disciple Robespierre. He emancipated the 
passions from the domination of the understanding. He 
liberated the imagination. He caught the harmonies of 
external nature, and gave them a new interpretation. 1 
He restored to French prose, colour, warmth, and the 
large utterance which it had lost. He created a literature 
in which all that is intimate, personal, lyrical asserted 
its rights, and urged extravagant claims. He overthrew 
the classical ideal of art, and enthroned the ego in its 
room. 



II 

The fermentation of ideas was now quickened by the 
new life of passion — passion social and democratic as the 
days of Revolution approached ; passion also personal 
and private, which, welcomed as a sacred fire, too often 
made the inmost being of the individual a scene of 
igitating and desolating conflict. 

The Abbe Raynal (1713-96) made his Histoire des Deux 
Jndes a receptacle not only for just views and useful 

1 Among writers who fostered the new feeling for external nature, Ramond 
( 1 755-1827), who derived his inspiration, partly scientific, partly imaginative, 
from the Swiss Alps and the Pyrenees, deserves special mention. 



I 



322 FRENCH LITERATURE 

information, but for every extravagance of thought and 
sentiment. " Insert into my book," he said to his brother 
philosophers, " everything that you choose against God, 
against religion, and against government." In the third 
edition appears a portrait of the author, posing theatri- 
cally, with the inscription, "To the defender of humanity, 
of truth, of liberty ! " The salons caught the temper of 
the time. Voltairean as they were, disposed to set down 
Rousseau as an enthusiast or a charlatan, they could 
not resist the invasion of passion or of sensibility. It 
mingled with a swarm of incoherent ideas and gave 
them a new intensity of life. The incessant play of 
intellect flashed and glittered for many spirits over a 
moral void ; the bitter, almost misanthropic temper 
of Chamfort's maxims and pensees may testify to the 
vacuity of faith and joy ; sentiment and passion came 
to Ml the void; to desire, to love, to pity, to suffer, to 
weep, was to live the true life of the heart. 

Madame du Deffand (1697-1780) might oppose the 
demon of ennui with the aid of a cool temperament 
and a brilliant wit ; at sixty -eight, whatever ardour 
had been secretly stored up in her nature escaped to 
lavish itself half-maternally on Horace Walpole. Her 
young companion and reader, who became a rival and 
robbed her salon of its brilliance, Mdlle. de Lespinasse 
(1732 ?~76) might cherish a calm friendship for D'Alem- 
bert. When M. de Guibert came to succeed M. de 
Mora in her affections, she poured out the lava torrent 
of passion in those Letters which have given her a place 
beside Sappho and beside Eloisa. Madame Roland in 
her girlhood had been the ardent pupil of Rousseau, 
whose Nouvelle Heloise was to her as a revelation from 
heaven. The first appearance in literature of Madame 



BEAUMARCHAIS 323 

Necker's amazing daughter was as the eulogist of 
Rousseau. 

The intellect untouched by emotion may be aristo- 
cratic ; passion and sentiment have popular and demo- 
cratic instincts. * The Revolution was already in action," 
said Napoleon, "when in 1784 Beaumarchais's Mariage 
de Figaro appeared upon the stage." If Napoleon's 
words overstate the fact, we may at least name that 
masterpiece of comedy a symptom of the coming ex- 
plosion, or even, in Sainte-Beuve's words, an armed 
Fronde. 

Pierre-Augustin Caron, who took the name of Beau- 
marchais (1732-99), son of a watchmaker of Paris, was 
born under a merry star, with a true genius for comedy, 
yet his theatrical pieces were only the recreations of a 
man of affairs — a demon of intrigue — determined to build 
up his fortune by financial adventures and commercial 
enterprises. Suddenly in 1774-75 he leaped into fame. 
Defeated in a trial in which his claim to fifteen thousand 
livres was disputed, Beaumarchais, in desperate circum- 
stances, made his appeal to public opinion in four 
Me'moires, which admirably united seriousness, gaiety, 
argument, irony, eloquence, and dramatic talent. " I 
am a citizen," he cried — "that is to say, something wholly 
new, unknown, unheard of in France. I am a citizen — 
that is to say, what you shou'd have been two hundred 
years ago, what perhaps you will be twenty years hence." 
The word "citizen" sounded strange in 1774; it was 
soon to become familiar. 

Before this incident Beaumarchais had produced two 
dramas, Eugenie and Les Deux Amis, of the tearful, senti- 
mental, bourgeois type, yet with a romantic tendency, 
which distinguishes at least Eugenie from the bourgeois 



324 FRENCH LITERATURE 

drama of Diderot and of Sedaine. The failure of the 
second may have taught their author the wisdom of 
mirth ; he abandoned his high dramatic principles to 
laugh and to evoke laughter. Le Barbier de Seville, de- 
veloped from a comic opera to a comedy in five acts, 
was given, after long delays, in 1775. The spectators 
manifested fatigue ; instantly the play reappeared in four 
acts, Beaumarchais having lost no time in removing the 
fifth wheel from his carriage. It delighted the public 
by the novelty of its abounding gaiety, a gaiety full and 
free, yet pointed with wit, a revolving firework scattering 
its dazzling spray. The old comic theme of the amorous 
tutor, the charming pupil, the rival lover, adorned with 
the prestige of youth, the intriguing attendant, was 
renewed by a dialogue which was alive with scintillating 
lights. 

From the success' of the Barbier sprang Le Mariage 
de Figaro. Completed in 1778, the royal opposition to its 
performance was not overcome until six years afterwards. 
By force of public opinion the watchmaker's son had 
triumphed over the King. The subject of the play is of 
a good tradition — a daring valet disputes the claim of a 
libertine lord to the possession of his betrothed. Spanish 
colour and Italian intrigue are added to the old mirth of 
France. From Regnard the author had learnt to en- 
tangle a varied intrigue ; from Lesage he borrowed his 
Spanish costumes and decoration — Figaro himself is a 
Gil Bias upon the stage ; in Marivaux he saw how women 
may assert themselves in comic action with a bright 
audacity. The Mariage de Figaro resumes the past ; it 
depicts the present, as a social satire, and a painting of 
manners ; it conveys into art the experience, the spirit, 
the temerity of Beaumarchais's adventurous life as a man 



THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO 325 

of the world ; it creates characters — Almaviva, Suzanne, 
Figaro himself, the budding Cherubin. It is at the same 
time — or, rather, became through its public reception — 
a pamphlet in comedy which announces the future ; 
it ridicules the established order with a sprightly in- 
solence ; it pleads for social equality ; it exposes the 
iniquity of aristocratic privilege, the venality of justice, 
the greed of courtiers, the chicanery of politicians. 
Figaro, since he appeared in "The Barber of Seville," h?.s 
grown somewhat of a moralist and a pedant; he must 
play the part of censor of society, he must represent the 
spirit of independent criticism, he must maintain the 
cause of intelligence against the authority of rank and 
station. Beaumarchais may have lacked elevation and 
delicacy, but he knew his craft as a dramatist, and left a 
model of prose comedy from which in later years others 
of his art and mystery made profitable studies. He 
restored mirth to the stage ; he rediscovered theatrical 
intrigue ; he created a type, which was Beaumarchais 
himself, and was also the lighter genius of France ; he 
was the satirist of society ; he was the nimble-feathered 
bird that foretells the storm. 



Ill 

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre connects Rousseau with 
Chateaubriand and the romantic school of the nine- 
teenth century. The new feeling for external nature 
attained through him a wider range, embracing the 
romance of tropic lands ; it acquired an element of the 
exotic ; at the same time, descriptive writing became 
more vivid and picturesque, and the vocabulary for the 



i 



326 FRENCH LITERATURE 

purposes of description was enlarged. He added to 
French literature a tale in which human passion and 
the sentiment of nature are fused together by the magic 
of genius; he created two figures which live in the 
popular imagination, encircled with a halo of love and 
sorrow. 

Born at Havre in 1737, Bernardin, through his ima- 
gination, was an Utopian visionary, an idyllic dreamer ; 
through his temper, an angry disputant with society. 
His life was a fantastic series of adventures. Having 
read as a boy the story of Crusoe, and listened to the 
heroic record of the travels and sufferings of Jesuit 
missionaries, his fancy caught fire ; he would seek some 
undiscovered island in mid-ocean, he would found some 
colony of the true children of nature, far from a corrupt 
civilisation, peaceable, virtuous, and free. 

In France, in Russia, he was importunate in urging 
his extravagant designs upon persons of influence. 
When the French Government in 1767 commissioned 
him to work in Madagascar, he believed that his dream 
was to come true, but a rude awakening and the accus- 
tomed quarrels followed. He landed on the Isle of 
France, purposing to work as an engineer, and there 
spent his days in gazing at the sea, the skies, the 
mountains, the tropical forests. All forms and colours 
and sounds and scents impressed themselves on his 
brain, and were transferred to his collection of notes. 
When, on returning to Paris, he published (1773) his 
Voyage a V lie de France, the literature of picturesque 
description may be said to have been founded. Already 
in this volume his feeling for nature is inspired by an 
emotional theism, and is burdened by his sentimental 
science, which would exhibit a fantastic array of evi- 



BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE 327 

dences of the designs for human welfare of an amiable 
and ingenious Author of nature. Before the book 
appeared, Bernardin had made the acquaintance of 
Rousseau, then living in retirement, tormented by his 
diseased suspicions and cloudy indignations. To his 
new disciple Rousseau was in general gracious, and they 
rambled together, botanising in the environs of Paris. 

For a time Bernardin himself was in a condition bor- 
dering upon insanity • but the crisis passed, and he 
employed himself on the Eludes de la Nature, which 
appeared in three volumes in 1784. The tale of Paul 
et Virginie was not included; for when the author had 
read it aloud, though ladies wept, the sterner auditors had 
been contemptuous ; Thomas slumbered, and Buffon 
called for his carriage. The Etudes accumulate the 
grotesque notions of Bernardin with reference to final 
causes in nature : nature is benevolent and harmo- 
nious ; society is corrupt and harsh ; scientific truth 
is to be discovered by sentiment, and not by reason ; 
the whole universe is planned for the happiness of 
man ; the melon is large because it was designed for 
the family ; the pumpkin is larger, because Providence 
intended that it should be shared with our neighbours. 
Providence, indeed, in a sceptical and mocking gene- 
ration, suffered cruelly at the hands of its advocate. 
Yet Bernardin conveyed into his book a feeling of the 
rich and obscure life and energy of nature ; his de- 
scriptive power is admirable. " He desired," says M. 
Barine, " to open the door for Providence to enter ; in 
fact he opened the door for the great Pan," and in 
this he was a precursor of much that followed in 
literature. 

Bernardin's fame was now established. In the senti- 



328 FRENCH LITERATURE 

mental reaction against the dryness of sceptical philo- 
sophy, in the return to a feeling for the poetical aspect 
of things, he was looked upon as a leader. In the 
fourth volume of Etudes (1788) he had courage to print 
the tale of. Paul et Virginie. It is an idyll of the tropics, 
written with the moral purpose of contrasting the. bene- 
ficent influence of nature and of feeling with the dangers 
and evils of civilised society and of the intellect. The 
children grow up side by side in radiant innocence and- 
purest companionship ; then passion makes its invasion 
of their hearts. The didactic commonplaces and the 
faded sentimentalities of the idyll may veil, but cannot 
hide, the genuine power of those pages which tell of the 
modest ardours of first love. An element of melodrama 
mingles with the tragic close. Throughout we do more 
than see the landscape of the tropics : we feel the life 
of external nature throbbing in sympathy with human 
emotion. Something was gained by Bernardin from the 
Daphnis and Chloe of Longus in the motives and the 
details of his story, but it is essentially his own. It had 
a resounding success, and among its most ardent admirers 
was Napoleon. 

Bernardin married at fifty-five, and became the father 
of a Paul and a Virginie. On the death of his wife, whom 
he regarded as a faithful housekeeper, he married again, 
and his life was divided between the devotion of an old 
man's love and endless quarrels with his colleagues of 
the Institut. His later writings added nothing to his 
fame. La Chaumiere Indienne — the story of a pariah 
who learns wisdom from nature and from the heart — 
has a certain charm, but it lacks the power of the better 
portions of Paul et Vh'ginie. The Harmonies de la Nature 
is a feeble reflection of the Etudes. Chateaubriand, to 



THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY 329 

whom Bernardin was personally known, gave a grudging 
recognition of the genius of his precursor. Lamartine, 
in after years, was a more generous disciple. In January 
1814 Bernardin died, murmuring the name of God; 
among the great events of the time his death was almost 
unnoticed. 



IV 

In the second half of the eighteenth century, aided by 
the labours of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles- 
Lettres, came a revival of the study of antiquity and of 
the sentiment for classical art. The Count de Caylus 
( 1 692-1765), travelling in Italy and the East with the 
enthusiasm of an archaeologist, presented in his writings 
an ideal of beauty and grace which was new to sculptors 
and painters of the time. The discovery of Pompeii fol- 
lowed, after an interval, the discovery of Herculaneum. 
The Abbe Barth£lemy (1716-95) embodied the erudite 
delights of a lifetime in his Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis 
en Grece (1788), which seemed a revelation of the genius 
of Hellenism as it existed four centuries prior to the 
Christian era. It was an ideal Greece — the Greece of 
Winckelmann and Goethe — unalterably gracious, radi- 
antly calm, which was discovered by the eighteenth 
century; but it served the imaginative needs of the age. 
We trace its influence in the harmonious forms of 
Bernardin's and Chateaubriand's imagining, and in the 
marbles of Canova. A poet, the offspring of a Greek 
mother and a French father — Andre Chenier — a latter- 
day Greek or demi-Greek himself, and yet truly a man 
of his own century, interpreted this new ideal in literary 
art. 



330 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Bora at Constantinople in 1762, Andr£ Ch£nier was 
educated in France, travelled in Switzerland and Italy, 
resided as secretary to the French Ambassador for three 
weary years in England — land of mists, land of dull aris- 
tocrats — returned to France in 1790, ardent in the cause 
of constitutional freedom, and defended his opinions and 
his friends as a journalist. The violences of the Revolu- 
tion drove him into opposition to the Jacobin party. In 
March 1794 he was arrested ; on the 25th July, two days 
before the overthrow of Robespierre, Andre Chenier's 
head fell on the scaffold. 

Only two poems, the Jen de Paume and the Hymne 
aux Suisses, were published by Chenier ; after his death 
appeared in journals the Jeune Captive and the Jeune 
Tarentine ; his collected poems, already known in manu- 
script to lovers of literature, many of them fragmentary, 
were- issued in 1819. The romantic school had come 
into existence without his aid ; but under Sainte-Beuve's 
influence it chose to regard him as a predecessor, and 
during the years about 1830 he was studied and imitated 
as a master. 

He belongs, however, essentially to the eighteenth 
century, to its graceful sensuality, its revival of antiquity, 
its faith in human reason, its comprehensive science of 
nature and of society. In certain of his poems suggested 
by public occasions he is little more than a disciple of 
Lebrun. His lilegies are rather Franco-Roman than 
Greek ; these, together with beauties of their own, have 
the characteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the 
mundane voluptuousness of their age. His philo- 
sophical poem Hermes, of which we have designs and 
fragments, would have been the De Rerum Natnra of an 
admiring student of Buffon. 



ANDRE CHENIER 331 

In his Eglogues and his epic fragments he is a Greek or 
a demi-Greek, who has learnt directly from Homer, from 
the pastoral and idyllic poets of antiquity, and from the 
Anthology. The Greece of Chenier's imagination is the 
ideal Greece of his time, more finely outlined, more deli- 
cately coloured., more exquisitely felt by him than was 
possible with his contemporaries in an age of prose. " It 
is the landscape-painter's Greece," writes M. Faguet, "the 
Greece of fair river -banks, of gracious hill -slopes, of 
comely groups around a well-head or a stream, of har- 
monious theories beside the voiceful sea, of dancing 
choirs upon the luminous heights, under the blue 
heavens, which lift to ecstasy his spirit, light as the light 
breathing of the Cyclades." 

In the Iambes, inspired by the emotions of the Revolu- 
tion during his months of imprisonment, Chenier united 
modern passion with the beauty of classic form ; satire 
in these loses its critical temper, and becomes truly 
lyrical. In his versification he attained new and alluring 
harmonies ; he escaped from the rhythmical uniformity 
of eighteenth-century verse, gliding sinuously from line 
to line and from strophe to strophe. He did over again 
for French poetry the work of the Pleiade, but he did 
this as one who was a careful student and a critic of 
Malherbe. 



BOOK THE FIFTH 

1789-1850 



BOOK THE FIFTH 

1789-1850 

CHAPTER I 

THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE— MADAME 
DE STAEL— CHATEAUBRIAND 

I 

The literature of the Revolution and the Empire is that 
of a period of transition. Madame de Stael and Chateau- 
briand announce the future ; the writers of an inferior 
rank represent with declining power the past, and give 
some faint presentiment of things to come. The great 
political concussion was not favourable to art. Abstract 
ideas united with the passions of the hour produced poetry 
which was of the nature of a declamatory pamphlet. 
Innumerable pieces were presented on the stage, but 
their literary value is insignificant. 

Marie-Joseph Chenier (1764-1811), brother of the great 
poet who perished on the scaffold, attempted to inau- 
gurate a school of national tragedy in his Charles IX. ; 
neither he nor the public knew history or possessed the 
historical sentiment — his tragedy was a revolutionary 
" school of kings." Arnault, Legouve, Nepomucene, 



336 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Lemercier were applauded for their classic dignity, or 
their depth of characterisation, or their pomp of lan- 
guage. The true tragedy of the time was enacted in the 
streets and in the clubs. Comedy was welcome in days 
of terror as at all other times. Collin d'Harleville drew 
mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in Le 
Vieux Celibataire (1792) ; Fab re d' Eglantine moralised 
Moliere to the taste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante 
debased by egoism and accommodations with the world ; 
Louis Laya, during the trial of the King, satirised the 
pretenders to patriotism in L Ami des Lois, yet escaped 
the vengeance of the Jacobins. 

Historical comedy, a novelty in art, was seen in Lemer- 
cier's Pinto (1799), where great events are reduced to 
petty dimensions, and the destiny of nations is satirically 
viewed as a vulgar game of trick-track. In his Christophe 
Colomb of 1809 he dared to despise the unities of time 
and place, and excited a battle, not bloodless, among the 
spectators. Exotic heroes suited the imperial regime. 
Baour-Lormian, the translator of Ossian (1801), converted 
the story of Joseph in Egypt into a frigid tragedy ; 
Hector and Tippoo Sahib, Mahomet II., and Ninus II. 
(with scenes of Spanish history transported to Assyria) 
diversified the stage. The greatest success was that of 
Raynouard's Les Templiers (1805) ; the learned author 
wisely applied his talents in later years to romance philo- 
logy. Among the writers of comedy — Andrieux, Etienne, 
Duval, and others — Picard has the merit of reproducing 
the life of the day, satirising social classes and conditions 
with vivacity and careless mirth. In melodrama, Pixere- 
court contributed unconsciously to prepare the way for 
the romantic stage. Desaugiers, with his gift for gay. 
plebeian song, was the master of the vaudeville. 



POETRY OF THE EMPIRE 337 

Song of a higher kind had been heard twice or thrice 
during the Revolution. The lesser Chenier's Chanson du 
Depart has in it a stirring rhetoric for soldiers of the Re- 
public sent forth to war with the acclaim of mother and 
wife and maiden, old men and little children. Lebrun- 
Pindare, in his ode Sur le Vaisseau le Vengeur y does not 
quite stifle the sense of heroism under his flowers of 
classical imagery. Rouget de Lisle's improvised verse 
and music, La Marseillaise (1792), was an inspiration 
which equally lent itself to the enthusiasm of victory 
and the gallantries of despair. The pseudo-epics and 
the descriptive poetry of the Empire are laboured and 
lifeless. But Creuze de Lesser', in his Chevaliers de la 
Table-Ronde (1812) and other poems, and Baour-Lormian, 
in his Poesies Ossianiques, widened the horizons of litera- 
ture. The Panhypocrisiade of Lemercier, published in 
1819, but written several years earlier — an "infernal 
comedy of the sixteenth century " — is an amazing chaos 
of extravagance, incompetence, and genius ; it bears to 
Hugo's Legende des Siecles the relation which the mega- 
therium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous 
analogues. 

If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's 
poetry, we may find it in the harmonious melancholy of 
Chenedolle, in the grace of Fontanes' stanzas, in the 
timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The special charac- 
ter of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination 
of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, 
with a certain reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by t_> 
be realised, which it could not attain. Its comparative 
sterility is not to be explained solely or chiefly by 
the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications. 
The preceding century had lost the large feeling for 



338 FRENCH LITERATURE 

composition, for beauty and severity of form ; attention 
was fixed upon details. If invention ceased to create, 
it must necessarily trick out what was commonplace in 
ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literature in the 
eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and 
had become a social and political weapon ; under the 
imperial rule this militant function was withdrawn ; 
what remained for literature but frigid ambitions or 
petty adornments, until a true sense of art was once 
again recovered ? 

The Revolution closed the salons and weakened the 
influence of cultivated society upon literature. Journal- 
ism and the pamphlet filled the place left vacant by 
the salons. The Decade Philosophique was the organ of 
the ideologists, who applied the conceptions of Condillac 
and his followers to literary and philosophical criticism. 
In 1789 the Journal des Debats was founded. Much 
ardour of feeling, much vigour of intellect was ex- 
pended in the columns of the public press. Among 
the contributors were Andre Chenier, Mallet du Pin, 
Suard, Rivarol. With a little ink and a guillotine, 
Camiile Desmoulins hoped to render France happy, 
prosperous, and republican. Heady, vain, pleasure- 
loving, gay, bitter, sensitive, with outbreaks of generosity 
and moments of elevation, he did something to redeem 
his crimes and follies by pleas for justice and mercy 
in his journal, Le Vieux Cordelier, and died, with Danton 
as his companion, after a frenzy of resistance and 
despair. 

The orators of the Revolution glorified doctrinaire 
abstractions, overflowed with sentimental humanity, 
and decorated their harangues with heroic examples of 
Roman virtue. The most abstract, colourless, and aca- 



MIRABEAU 339 

demic was Rousseau's disciple, who took the " Supreme 
Being " under his protection, Robespierre. The fervid 
spirit of the Girondins found its highest expression in 
Vergniaud, who, with infirm character, few ideas, and 
a hesitating policy, yet possessed a power of vibrating 
speech. Danton, the Mirabeau of the populace, was 
richer in ideas, and with sudden accesses of imagina- 
tion thundered in words which tended to action ; but in 
general the Mountain cared more for deeds than words. 
The young Saint-Just thrilled the Convention with icy 
apothegms which sounded each, short and sharp, like 
the fall of the knife. Barnave, impetuous in his temper, 
was clear and measured in discourse, and once in opposi- 
tion to Mirabeau, defending the royal prerogative, rose 
beyond himself to the height of a great occasion. 

But it was Mirabeau, and Mirabeau alone, who pos- 
sessed the genius of a great statesman united with the 
gifts of an incomparable orator. Born in 1749, of the 
old Riquetti family, impulsive, proud, romantic, yet clear 
of intellect and firmly grasping facts, a thinker and a 
student, calmly indifferent to religion, irregular in his 
conduct, the passionate foe of his father, the passionate 
lover of his Sophie and of her child, he had conceived, 
and in a measure comprehended, the Revolution long 
before the explosion came. Already he was a copious 
author on political subjects. He knew that France 
needed individual liberty and individual responsibility; 
he divined the dangers of a democratic despotism. He 
hoped by the decentralisation of power to balance Paris 
by the provinces, and quicken the political life of the 
whole country; he desired to balance the constitution 
by playing off the King against the Assembly, and the 
Assembly against the Kirg, and to control the action of 



34Q FRENCH LITERATURE 

each by the force of public opinion. From Montesquieu 
he had learnt the gains of separating the legislative, the 
executive, and the judicial functions. His hatred o { 
aristocracy, enhanced by the hardship of imprisonmen 
at Vincennes, led him to ignore an influence which migh 
have assisted in the equilibration of power. As an orator 
his ample and powerful rhetoric rested upon a basis of 
logic ; slow and embarrassed as he began to speak, he 
warmed as he proceeded, negligent of formal correct- 
ness, disdainful of the conventional classical decorations, 
magnificent in gesture, weaving together ideas, imagery, 
and passion. His speech, said Madame de Stael, was 
" like a powerful hammer, wielded by a skilful artist, 
and fashioning men to his will." At the sitting of the 
Assembly on April 2, 1791, the President announced, 
amid murmurs, " Ah ! il est mort," which anticipated his 
words, that Gabriel-Honore Riquetti was dead. 

"The 1 8th Brumaire," writes M. Lanson, "silenced 
the orators. For fifteen years a solitary voice was heard, 
imperious but eloquent. . . . Napoleon was the last of 
the great Revolutionary orators." As he advanced in 
power he dropped the needless ornaments of rhetoric, 
and condensed his summons to action into direct, effec- 
tive words, now simple and going straight at some motive 
of self-interest, now grandiose to seduce the imagination 
to his side. Speech with Napoleon was a means of 
government, and he knew the temper of the men whom 
he addressed. His own taste in literature was touched 
with sentimentality ; Ossian and Werther were among 
his favourite books ; but what may be styled the official 
literature of the Empire was of the decaying classical or 
neo-classical tradition. 

Yet while the democratic imperialism was the direct 



SCHOLARSHIP AND PHILOSOPHY 341 

offspring of the Revolution with its social contract and 
its rights of man, it was necessary to combat eighteenth- 
century ideas and defend the throne and the altar. Great 
scientific names — Laplace, Bichat, Cuvier, Lamarck — ■ 
testify to the fact that a movement which made the 
eighteenth century illustrious had not spent its force. 
Scholarship was laying the bases for future construc- 
tions ; Ginguene published in 181 1 the first volumes 
of his Histoire Litte'raire de I ' Italie ; Fauriel and Ray- 
nouard accumulated the materials for their historical, 
literary, and philological studies. Philosophy was turn- 
ing away from sensationalism, which seemed to have 
said its final word, towards spiritualist conceptions. 
Maine de Biran (1766-1824) found in the primitive 
fact of consciousness — the nisus of the will — and in 
the self-recognition of the ego as a cause, an escape 
from materialism. Royer - Collard (1763-1845), after- 
wards more distinguished in politics than he was in 
speculation, read for his class at the Sorbonne from 
the Scottish philosophy of Reid, and turned it by his 
commentary as a siege-train against the positions of 
Condillac. 

The germs of new literary growths were in the soil ; 
but the spring came slowly, and after the storms of 
Revolution were spent, a chill was in the air. Measure- 
less hopes, and what had come of them ? infinite desire, 
and so poor an attainment ! A disciple of Rousseau, 
who shared in his sentiment without his optimistic faith, 
and who, like Rousseau, felt the beauty of external nature 
without Rousseau's sense of its joy, Etienne Pivert de 
S£NANCOURT published in 1799 his Reveries, a book of 
disillusion, melancholy atheism, and stoical resistance to 
sadness, a resistance which he was unable to sustain. 



342 FRENCH LITERATURE 

It was followed in 1804 by Obermann, a romance in 
epistolary form, in which the writer, disguised in the 
character of his hero, expresses a fixed and sterile grief, 
knowing not what he needs, nor what he loves, nor what 
he wills, lamenting without a cause and desiring without 
an object. The glories of Swiss landscape, which quicken 
his imagination, do not suffice to fill the void that is in 
his soul ; yet perhaps in old age— if ever it come — he 
may resign himself to the infinite illusion of life. It is 
an indication of the current of the time that fifteen 
years later, when the Libres Meditations appeared, Senan- 
court had found his way through a vague theopathy to 
autumnal brightness, late-born hope, and tranquil recon- 
cilement with existence. 

The work of the professional critics of the time — 
Geoff roy, De Feletz, Dussault, Hoffman — counts now 
for less than the words of one who was only an amateur 
of letters, and a moralist who never moralised in public. 
Joseph Joubert(i754-i824), the friend of Fontanes and 
of Chateaubriand, a delicate spirit, filled with curiosity 
for ideas, and possessing the finest sense of the beauty 
of literature, lacked the strength and self-confidence 
needful in a literary career. He read everything ; he 
published nothing ; but the Pensees, which were col- 
lected from his manuscripts by Chateaubriand, and his 
letters reveal a thinker who loved the light, a studious 
dilettante charmed by literary grace, a writer tormented 
by the passion to put a volume in a page, a page in a 
phrase, a phrase in a word. Plato in philosophy, Virgil 
in poetry, satisfy his feeling for beauty and refinement 
of style. From Voltaire and Rousseau he turns away, 
offended by their lack of moral feeling, of sanity, of 
wisdom, of delicacy. A man of the eighteenth century, 






MADAME DE STAEL 343 

Joubert had lifted himself into thin clear heights of 
middle air, where he saw much of the past and some- 
thing of the future ; but the middle air is better suited 
for speculation than for action. 



II 

The movement towards the romantic theory and prac- 
tice of art was fostered in the early years of the nine- 
teenth century by two eminent writers — one a woman 
with a virile intellect, the other a man with more than a 
woman's imaginative sensibility — by Germaine de Stael 
and by Chateaubriand. The one exhibits the eighteenth 
century passing into the nineteenth, receiving new de- 
velopments, yet without a breach of continuity ; the 
other represents a reaction against the ideas of the age 
of the philosophers. Both opened new horizons — one, 
by the divinations of her ardent intelligence ; the other, 
by his creative genius. Madame de Stael interpreted 
new ideas and defined a new theory of art. Chateau- 
briand was himself an extraordinary literary artist. The 
style of the one is that of an admirable improvisator, 
a brilliant and incessant converser ; that of the other 
is at its best a miracle of studied invention, a harmony 
cf colour and of sound. The genius of the one was 
quickened in brilliant social gatherings ; a Parisian salon 
was her true seat of empire. The genius of the other 
was nursed in solitude by the tempestuous sea or on 
the wild and melancholy moors. 

Germaine Necker, born in 1766, daughter of the cele- 
brated Swiss banker and future minister of France, a 
child of precocious intelligence and eager sympathies, 



344 FRENCH LITERATURE 

reared amid the brilliant society of her mother's salon, 
a girl whose demands on life were large — demands of 
the intellect, demands of the heart — enamoured of the 
writings of Rousseau, married at twenty to the Swedish 
Ambassador, the Baron de Stael-Holstein, herself a light 
and an inspirer of the constitutional party of reform in 
the early days of the Revolution, in her literary work 
opened fresh avenues for nineteenth-century thought. 
She did not recoil from the eighteenth century, but 
rather carried forward its better spirit. The Revolution, 
as a social upheaval, she failed to understand ; her ideal 
was liberty, not equality ; and Necker's daughter was 
assured that all would be well were liberty established 
in constitutional forms of government. A republican 
among aristocrats, she was an aristocrat among republi- 
cans. During the years of Revolutionary trouble, the 
years of her flights from Paris, her returns, excursions, 
and retreats, she was sustained by her zeal for justice, 
her pity for the oppressed, and her unquenchable faith 
in human progress. 

A crude panegyric of Rousseau, certain political 
pamphlets, an Essai sur les Fictions, a treatise on the 
Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Indi- 
viduals and Nations (1796), were followed in 1800 by 
her elaborate study, De la Litterature conside'ree dans ses 
Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales. Its central idea 
is that of human progress : freedom, incarnated in 
republican institutions, will assure the natural develop- 
ment of the spirit of man ; a great literature will be 
the offspring of progress and of freedom ; and each 
nation will lend its lights to other nations to illuminate 
the general advance. Madame de Stael hoped to cast 
the spell of her intellect over the young conqueror 



! 



ADOLPHE: DELPHINE 345 

Bonaparte ; Bonaparte regarded a political meteor in 
feminine form with cold and haughty aversion. In 
1802 the husband, whom she had never loved, was 
dead. Her passion for benjamin Constant had passed 
through various crises in its troubled career — a series 
of attractions ending in repulsions, and repulsions lead- 
ing to attractions, such as may be discovered in Con- 
stant's remarkable novel Adolphe. They could neither 
decide to unite their lives, nor to part for ever. Adolphe, 
in Constant's novel, after a youth of pleasure-seeking, 
is disenchanted with life ; his love of Ellenore is that 
of one whose passions are exhausted, who loves for 
vanity or a new indulgence of egoism ; but Ellenore, 
whose youth is past, will abandon all for him, and she 
imposes on him the tyranny of her devotion. Each is 
the other's torturer, each is the other's consolation. In 
the mastery of his cruel psychology Constant anticipates 
Balzac. 

Madame de Stael lightened the stress of inward storm" 
by writing Delphine, the story of a woman of genius, 
whose heroic follies bring her into warfare with the 
world. The lover of Delphine, violent and feeble, sen- 
timental and egoistic, is an accomplice of the world in 
doing her wrong, and Delphine has no refuge but death 
in the wilds of America. 1 

In 1803 Madame de Stael received orders to trouble 
Paris with her torrent of ideas and of speech no longer. 
The illustrious victim of Napoleon's persecution has- 
tened to display her ideas at Weimar, where Goethe 
protected his equanimity, as well as might be, from 
the storm of her approach, and Schiller endured her 
literary enthusiasm with a sense of prostration. August 

1 In the first edition, Delphine dies by her own hand. 



346 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Wilhelm von Schlegel, tutor to her sons, became the 
interpreter of Germany to her eager and apprehensive 
mind. Having annexed Germany to her empire, she 
advanced to the conquest of Italy, and had her Roman 
triumph. England, which she had visited in her Re- 
volutionary flights, and Italy conspired in the creation 
of her novel Coriune (1807). It is again the history of a 
woman of genius, beautiful, generous, enthusiastic, whom 
the world understands imperfectly, and whom her Eng- 
lish lover, after his fit of Italian romance, discards with 
the characteristic British phlegm. The paintings of 
Italian nature are rhetorical exercises ; the writer's sym- 
pathy with art and history is of more value ; the inter- 
pretation of a woman's heart is alive with personal 
feeling. Madame de Stael's novels are old now, which 
means that they once were young, and for her own 
generation they had the freshness and charm of 
youth. 

Her father's death had turned her thoughts towards 
religion. A Protestant and a liberal, her spiritual:st 
faith now found support in the moral strength of Chris- 
tianity. She was not, like Chateaubriand > an epicurean 
and a Catholic ; she did not care to decorate religion 
with flowers, or make it fragrant with incense ; it 
spoke to her not through the senses, but directly to 
the conscience, the affections, and the will. In the 
chapters of her book on Germany which treat of "the 
religion of enthusiasm," her devout latitudinarianism 
finds expression. 

The book De V 'A llemagne, published in London in 1813, 
after the confiscation and destruction of the Paris edition 
by the imperial police, prepared the way by criticism 
for the romantic movement. It treats of manners, letters, 



DE L'ALLEMAGNE 347 

art, philosophy, religion, interpreting with astonishing 
insight, however it may have erred in important details, 
the mind of Germany to the mind of France. It was 
a Germany of poets, dreamers, and metaphysicians, 
loyal and sincere, but incapable of patriotic passion, 
disqualified for action and for freedom, which she in 
1804 had discovered. The life of society produces lite- 
rature in France ; the genius of inward meditation and 
sentiment produces literature in Germany. The litera- 
ture and art of the South are classical, those of the 
North are romantic ; and since the life of our own 
race and the spirit of our own religion are infused 
into romantic art, it has in it possibilities of indefinite 
growth. Madame de Stael advanced criticism by her 
sense that art and literature are relative to ages, races, 
governments, environments. She dreamed of an Euro- 
pean or cosmopolitan literature, in which each nation, 
while retaining its special characteristics, should be in 
fruitful communication with its fellows. 

In 181 1 Madame de Stael, when forty-five, became the 
wife of Albert de Rocca, a young Swiss officer, more 
than twenty years her junior. Their courage was re- 
warded by six years of happiness. Austria, Poland, 
Russia, Sweden, England were visited. Upon the fall 
of Napoleon Madame de Stael was once more in Paris, 
and there in T817 she died. The Dix Annees d 'Exil, pos- 
thumously published, records a portion of her agitated 
life, and exhales her indignation against her imperial 
persecutor. The unfinished Considerations sur la Revolu- 
tion Francaise, designed originally as an apology for 
Necker, defends the Revolution while admitting its 
crimes and errors ; its true object, as the writer con- 
ceived—political liberty — had been in the end attained; 



348 FRENCH LITERATURE 

her ideal of liberty was indeed far from that of a revolu- 
tionary democracy; England, liberal, constitutional, with 
a system at once popular and aristocratic, was the country 
in which she saw her political aspirations most nearly 
realised. 



Ill 

Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand was born in 1768, 
at St.-Malo, of an ancient Breton family. Except for the 
companionship of an elder sister, of fragile health and 
romantic temper, his childhood was solitary. The pre- 
sence of the old count his father inspired terror. The 
boy's society was with the waves and winds, or at the 
old chateau of Combourg, with lonely woods and wilds. 
Horace, Tibullus, Telemaque, the sermons of Massillon, 
nourished his imagination or stimulated his religious 
sentiment ; but solitude and nature were his chief in- 
spirers. 

At seventeen he already seemed worn with the fatigue 
of unsatisfied dreaming, before he had begun to know 
life. A commission in the army was procured for him. 
He saw, interested yet alien in heart, something of literary 
life in Paris; then in Revolution days (1791) he quitted 
France, and, with the dream of discovering the North- 
West Passage, set sail to America. If he did not make 
any geographical discovery, Chateaubriand found his 
own genius in the western world. The news of the 
execution of Louis XVI. decided him to return; a Breton 
and a royalist should show himself among the ranks of 
the emigrants. To gratify the wish of his family, he mar- 
ried before crossing the frontier. Madame de Chateau- 



CHATEAUBRIAND 349 

briand had the dignity to veil her sorrow caused by an 
imperfect union, and at a later time she won such a portion 
of her husband's regard as he could devote to another 
than himself. 

The episode of war having soon closed — not without 
a wound and a serious illness — he found a refuge in 
London, enduring dire poverty, but possessing the con- 
solation of friendship with Joubert and Fontanes, and 
there he published in 1797 his first work, the Essai sui- 
tes Revolutions. The doctrine of human progress had been 
part of the religion of the eighteenth century ; Chateau- 
briand in 1797 had faith neither in social, nor political, 
nor religious progress. Why be deceived by the hopes 
of revolution, since humanity can only circle for ever 
through an exhausting round of illusions ? The death 
of his mother and words of a dying sister awakened him 
from his melancholy mood ; he resolved to write a second 
book, which should correct the errors of the first, and 
exhibit a source of hope and joy in religion. To the 
eighteenth century Christianity had appeared as a gross 
and barbarous superstition ; he would show that it was a 
religion of beauty, the divine mother of poetry and of 
art, a spring of poetic thought and feeling alike through 
its dogma and its ritual ; he would convert literature from 
its decaying cult of classicism, and restore to honour the 
despised Middle Ages. 

The Genie du Christianisme, begun during its author's 
residence in London, was not completed until four years 
later. In 1801, detaching a fragment from his poetic 
apology for religion, he published his Atala, ou tes Amours 
de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert. It is a romance, or 
rather a prose poem, in which the magic of style, the 
enchantment of descriptive power, the large feeling for 



350 FRENCH LITERATURE 

nature, the sensibility to human passion, conceal many 
infirmities of design and of feeling. Chateaubriand 
suddenly entered into his fame. 

On April 18, 1802, the Concordat was celebrated with 
high solemnities ; the Archbishop of Paris received the 
First Consul within the portals of Notre-Dame. It was 
the fitting moment for the publication of the Genie du 
Christianisme. Its value as an argumentative defence 
of Christianity may not be great ; but it was the restora- 
tion of religion to art, it contained or implied a new 
system of aesthetics, it was a glorification of devout 
ssntiment, it was a pompous manifesto of romanticism, 
it recovered a lost ideal of beauty. From Ronsard to 
Chenier the aim of art had been to imitate the ancients, 
while imitating or interpreting life. Let us be national, 
let us be modern, let us therefore be Christians, de- 
clared Chateaubriand, and let us seek for our tradition 
in the great Christian ages. It was a revolution in art 
for which he pleaded, and throughout the first half 
of the nineteenth century the revolution was in active 
pro 'ress. 

The episode of Rene, which was included in the Ge'rne, 
and afterwards published separately, has been described 
as a Christianised Werther; its passion is less frank, and 
even more remote from sanity of feeling, than that of 
Goethe's novel, but the sadness of the hero is more mag- 
nificently posed. A sprightly English lady described 
Chateaubriand as "wearing his heart in a sling"; he 
did so during his whole life ; and through Rene we 
divine the inventor of Rene carrying his wounded heart, 
as in the heroine we can discern some features of his 
sister Lucile. In all his writings his feelings centre in 
himself : he is a pure egoist through his sensibility ; but 



CHATEAUBRIAND 351 

around his own figure his imagination, marvellous in its 
expansive power, can deploy boundless perspectives. 

Both Atala and Rene, though brought into connection 
with the Genie du Christianisme, are in fact more closely 
related to the prose epic Les Natchez, written early, but 
held in reserve until the publication of his collected works 
in 1826-31. Les Natchez, inspired by Chateaubriand's 
American travels, idealises the life of the Red Indian 
tribes. The later books, where he escapes from the 
pseudo-epic manner, have in them the finest spirit of 
his early years, his splendour and delicacy of descrip- 
tion, his wealth of imaginative reverie. Famous as the 
author of the Genie, Chateaubriand was appointed secre- 
tary to the embassy at Rome. The murder of the Due 
d'Enghien alienated him from Napoleon. Putting aside 
the Martyrs, on which he had been engaged, he sought 
for fresh imagery and local colour to enrich his work, 
in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a record of which was 
published in his (181 1) Itine'raire de Pains a Jerusalem. 

The Martyrs appeared in 1809. It was designed as a 
great example of that art, inspired by Christianity, on 
behalf of which he had contended in the Genie; the 
religion of Christ, he would prove, can create passions 
and types of character better suited for noble imagina- 
tive treatment than those of paganism ; its supernatural 
marvels are more than a compensation for the loss of 
pagan mythology. The time chosen for his epopee in 
prose is the reign of the persecutor Diocletian ; Rome 
and the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, Egypt, the 
deserts of the Thebaid, Jerusalem, Sparta, Athens, form 
only portions of the scene ; heaven and hell are open 
to the reader, but Chateaubriand, whose faith was rather 
a sentiment than a passion, does not succeed in making 



352 FRENCH LITERATURE 

his supernatural habitations and personages credible 
even to the fancy. Far more admirable are many of 
the terrestrial scenes and narrations, and among these, 
in particular the story of Eudore. 

In the course of the travels which led him to Jerusalem, 
Chateaubriand had visited Spain, and it was his recollec- 
tions of the Alhambra that moved him to write, about 
1809, the Aventures du Dernier des Abencerages, published 
many years later. It shows a tendency towards self- 
restraint, excellent in itself, but not entirely in har- 
mony with his effusive imagination. With this work 
Chateaubriand's inventive period of authorship closed ; 
the rest of his life was in the main that of a politician. 
From the position of an unqualified royalist (1814-24) 
he advanced to that of a liberal, and after 1830 may 
be described as both royalist and republican. His 
pamphlet of 18 14, De Bonaparte et des Bourdons, was 
declared by Louis XVIII. to be worth an army to his 
cause. 

In his later years he published an Essai sur la Lit- 
teratwe Anglaise and a translation of "Paradise Lost." 
But his chief task was the revision of the Memoires 
d' Outre-Tombe, an autobiography designed for posthu- 
mous publication, and actually issued in the pages of 
the Presse, through the indiscreet haste of the publishers, 
while Chateaubriand was still living. Its egotism, its 
vanity, its malicious wit, its fierce reprisals on those 
whom the writer regarded as his enemies, its many 
beauties, its brilliance of style, make it an exposure of 
all that was worst and much of what was best in his 
character and genius. Tended by his old friend Mme. 
Recamier, to whom, if to any one, he was sincerely 
attached, Chateaubriand died in the summer of 1848. 



CHATEAUBRIAND'S INFLUENCE 353 

His tomb is on the rocky islet of Grand-Be, off the coast 
of Brittany. 

Chateaubriand cannot be loved, and his character 
cannot be admired without grave reserves. But an 
unique genius, developed at a fortunate time, enabled 
him to play a most significant part in the history of 
literature. He was the greatest of landscape painters ; 
he restored to art the sentiment of religion ; he inter- 
preted the romantic melancholy of the age. If he posed 
magnificently, there were native impulses which sug- 
gested the pose ; and at times, as in the Itineraire, the 
pose is entirely forgotten. His range of ideas is not 
extraordinary; but vision, imagination, and the passion 
which makes the imaginative power its instrument, were 
his in a supereminent degree. 



CHAPTER II 

THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS 

While the imagination of France was turning towards 
the romance of the Middle Ages and the art of Chris- 
tianity, Hellenic scholarship was maintained by Jean- 
Francois Boissonade. The representative of Hellenism 
in modern letters was Courier, a brave but undisciplined 
artillery officer under Napoleon, who loved the sight of 
a Greek manuscript better than he loved a victory. Paul- 
Louis Courier de MerE (1772-1825) counts for nothing 
in the history of French thought ; in the history of French 
letters his pamphlets remain as masterpieces of Attic 
grace, luminous, light and bright in narrative, easy in 
dialogue, of the finest irony in comment, impeccable 
in measure and in malice. The translator of Daphnis 
and Ckloe, wearied by war and wanderings in Italy, 
lived under the Restoration among his vines at Veretz, 
in Touraine. In 1816 he became the advocate of pro- 
vincial popular rights against the vexations of the Royalist 
reaction. He is a vine-dresser, a rustic bourgeois, oc- 
cupied with affairs of the parish. Shall Chambord be 
purchased for the Duke of Burgundy ? shall an in- 
tolerant young cure forbid the villagers to dance ? shall 
magistrates harass the humble folk ? Such are the ques- 
tions agitating the country-side, which the vine-dresser 
Courier will resolve. The questions have been replaced 



THEOCRATIC SCHOOL: MAISTRE 355 

to-day by others ; but nothing has quite replaced the 
Simple Discours, the Petition pour les Villageois, the 
Pamphlet dcs Pamphlets, in which the ease of the best 
sixteenth and seventeenth century prose is united with 
a deft rapier-play like that of Voltaire, and with the 
lucidity of the writer's classical models. 

Chateaubriand's artistic and sentimental Catholicism 
was the satisfaction of imaginative cravings. When 
Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) revolted against the 
eighteenth century, it was a revolt of the soul ; when 
he assailed the authority of the individual reason, it was 
in the name of a higher reason. Son of the President of 
the Senate of Savoy, he saw his country invaded by the 
French Republican soldiery in 1792, and he retired to 
Lausanne. He protested against the Revolutionary 
aggression in his Lettres d'un Royaliste Savoisien ; in- 
spired by the mystical Saint-Martin, in his Considerations 
stir la France, he interpreted the meaning of the great 
political cataclysm as the Divine judgment upon France 
— assigned by God the place of the leader of Christendom, 
the eldest daughter of the Church — for her faithlessness 
and proud self-will. The sacred chastisement accom- 
plished, monarchy and Catholicism must be restored to 
an intact and regenerated country. During fifteen years 
Maistre served the King of Sardinia as envoy and pleni- 
potentiary at the Russian Court, maintaining his dignity 
in cruel distress upon the salary of a clerk. Amiable in 
his private life, he was remorseless — with the stern charity 
of an inquisitor — in dogma. In a style of extraordinary 
clearness and force he expounded a system of ideas, 
logically connected, on which to base a complete re- 
organisation of European society. Those ideas are set 
forth most powerfully in the dialogues entitled Les Soirees 






356 FRENCH LITERATURE 

de Saint- Petersbourg and the treatises Du Pape and De 
VEglise Gallicane. 

He honours reason ; not the individual reason, source 
of innumerable errors, but the general reason, which, 
emanating from God, reveals universal and immutable 
truth — quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. To 
commence philosophising we should despise the philo- 
sophers. Of these, Bacon, to whose errors Maistre de- 
votes a special study, is the most dangerous ; Locke is 
the most contemptible. The eighteenth century spoke 
of nature ; Maistre speaks of God, the Grand Monarch 
who rules His worlds by laws which are flexible in His 
hands. To punish is the prime duty of authority ; the 
great Justiciary avenges Himself on the whole offending 
race of men ; there is no government without an exe- 
cutioner. But God is pitiful, and allows us the refuge 
of prayer and sacrifice. Without religion there is no 
society ; without the Catholic Church there is no reli- 
gion ; without the sovereign Pontiff there is no Catholic 
Church. The sovereignty of the Pope is therefore the 
keystone of civilisation ; his it is to give and take away 
the crowns of kings. Governments absolute over the 
people, the Pontiff absolute over governments — such 
is the earthly reflection of the Divine monarchy in 
heaven. To suppose that men can begin the world 
anew from a Revolutionary year One, is the folly of 
private reason ; society is an organism which grows 
under providential laws ; revolutions are the expiation 
for sins. Such are the ideas which Maistre bound 
together in serried logic, and deployed with the mas- 
tery of an intellectual tactician. The recoil from in- 
dividualism to authority could not have found a more 
absolute expression. 



LAMENNAIS 357 

The Vicomte de Bonald (1754-1840), whose theocratic 
views have much in common with those of Maistre, and 
of his teacher Saint- Martin, dwelt on the necessity 
of language as a condition of thought, and maintained 
that language is of divine origin. Ballanche (1776- 
1847), half poet, half philosopher, connected theocratic 
ideas with a theory of human progress — a social and 
political palingenesis — which had in it the elements of 
political liberalism. Theocracy and liberalism met in 
the genius of FelicitE-Robert de Lamennais (1782- 
1854) ; they engaged after a time in conflict, and in 
the end the victory lay .with his democratic sympathies. 
A Breton and a priest, Lamennais, endowed with ima- 
gination, passion, and eloquence, was more a prophet 
than a priest. He saw the world around him perishing 
through lack of faith ; religion alone could give it life 
and health ; a Church, freed from political shackles, 
in harmony with popular tendencies, governed by the 
sovereign Pontiff, might animate the world anew. The 
voice of the Catholic Church is the voice of humanity, 
uttering the general reason of mankind. When the 
Essai sur I' Indifference en Matiere de Religion appeared, 
another Bossuet seemed to have arisen. But was a 
democratic Catholicism possible ? Lamennais trusted 
that it might be so, and as the motto of the journal 
L Avenir (1830), in which Lacordaire and Montalembert 
were his fellow-labourers, he- chose the words Dieu et 
Liberte. 

The orthodoxy of the Avenir was suspected. Lamen- 
nais, with his friends, journeyed to Rome "to consult 
the Lord in Shiloh," and in the Affaires de Rome recorded 
his experiences. The Encyclical of 1832 pronounced 
against the doctrines dearest to his heart and conscience ; 



35 8 FRENCH LITERATURE 

he bowed in submission, yet he could not abandon his 
inmost convictions. His hopes for a democratic theo- 
cracy failing, he still trusted in the peoples. But the 
democracy of his desire and faith was one not devoted 
to material interests ; to spiritualise the democracy be- 
came henceforth his aim. In the Paroles dun Croyant he 
announced in rhythmical prose his apocalyptic visions. 
" It is," said a contemporary, "a bonnet rouge planted on 
a cross." In his elder years Lamennais believed in a 
spiritual power, a common thought, a common will direct- 
ing society, as the soul directs the body, but, like the soul, 
invisible. His metaphysics, in which it is attempted to 
give a scientific interpretation and application to the 
doctrine of the Trinity, are set forth in the Esquisse dune 
Philosophie. His former associates, Lacordaire, the elo- 
quent Dominican, and Montalembert, the historian, 
learned and romantic, of Western monasticism, remained 
faithful children of the Church. Lamennais, no less 
devout in spirit than they, died insubmissive, and above 
his grave, among the poor of Pere-Lachaise, no cross was 
erected. 

The antagonism to eighteenth-century thought assumed 
other forms than those of the theocratic school. Victor 
Cousin (1792-1867), a pupil of Maine de Biran and 
Royer-Collard, became at the age of twenty-three a 
lecturer on philosophy at the Sofbonne. He was enthu- 
siastic, ambitious, eloquent ; with scanty knowledge he 
spoke as one having authority, and impressed his hearers 
with the force of a ruling personality. Led on from 
Scotch to German philosophy, and having the advantage 
of personal acquaintance with Hegel, he advanced 
through psychology to metaphysics. Not in the senses 
but in the reason, impersonal in its spontaneous activity, 



ECLECTIC SCHOOL: SOCIALISM 359 

he recognised the source of absolute truth ; in the iirst 
act of consciousness are disclosed the finite, the infinite, 
and their mutual relations. In the history of philosophy, 
in its four great systems of sensationalism, idealism, 
scepticism, mysticism, he recognised the substance of 
philosophy itself undergoing the process of evolution ; 
each system is true in what it affirms, false in what it 
denies. With psychology as a starting-point, and eclec- 
ticism as a method, Cousin attempted to establish a 
spiritualist doctrine. A young leader in the domain of 
thought, he became at a later time too imperious a ruler. 
In the writings of his disciple and friend ThEodore 
Jouffroy (1796-1842) there is a deeper accent of reality. 
Doubting, and contending with his doubts, Jouffroy 
brooded upon the destiny of man, made inquisition into 
the problems of psychology, refusing to identify mental 
science with physiology, and applied his remarkable 
powers of patient and searching thought to the solution 
of questions in morals and aesthetics. The school of 
Cousin has been named eclectic ; it should rather be 
named spiritualist. The tendencies to which it owed its 
origin extended beyond philosophy, and are apparent 
in the literary art of Cousin's contemporaries. 

As a basis for social reconstruction the spiritualist 
philosophy was ineffectual. Another school of thought 
issuing from the Revolution, yet opposing ts anarchic in- 
dividualism, aspired to regenerate society by the applica- 
tion of the principles of positive science. Claude-Henri 
de Saint-Simon (1760- 1825), and Francois-Charles 
Fourier (1772-1837), differing in many of their opinions, 
have a common distinction as the founders of modern 
socialism. Saint-Simon's ideal was that of a State con- 
trolled in things of the mind by men of science, and in 



360 FRENCH LITERATURE 

material affairs by the captains of industry. The aim of 
society should be the exploitation of the globe by associa- 
tive effort. In his Nonveau Christianisme he thought to 
deliver the Christian religion from the outworn supersti- 
tion, as he regarded it, alike of Catholicism and Pro- 
testantism, and to point out its true principle as adapted 
to our nineteenth century — that of human charity, the 
united effort of men towards the well-being of the 
poorest class. 

Saint-Simon, fantastic, incoherent, deficient in the 
scientific spirit and in the power of co-ordinating his 
results, yet struck out suggestive ideas. A great and sys- 
tematic thinker, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who was 
associated with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824, perceived 
the significance of these ideas, and was urged forward by 
them to researches properly his own. The positivism of 
Comte consists of a philosophy and a polity, in which a 
religion is involved. The quickening of his emotional 
nature through an adoring friendship with Mme. Clotilde 
de Vaux, made him sensible of the incompleteness of his 
earlier efforts at an intellectual reconstruction ; he felt 
the need of worship and of love. Comte's philosophy 
proceeds from the theory that all human conceptions 
advance from the primitive theological state, through 
the metaphysical — when abstract forces, occult causes, 
scholastic entities are invented to explain the phenomena 
of nature — to the positive, when at length it is recog- 
nised that human knowledge cannot pass beyond the 
region of phenomena. With these stages corresponds 
the progress of society from militarism, aggressive or 
defensive, to industrialism. The several abstract sciences 
• — those dealing with the laws of phenomena rather than 
with the application of laws — are so arranged by Comte 



POSITIVISM 361 

as to exhibit each more complex science resting on a 
simpler, to which it acids a new order of truths ; the 
whole erection, ascending to the science of sociology, 
which includes a dynamical as well as a statical doctrine 
of human society — a doctrine of the laws of progress as 
well as of the laws of order — is crowned by morals. 

In the polity of positivism the supreme spiritual power 
is entrusted to a priesthood of science. Their moral 
influence will be chiefly directed to reinforcing the social 
feeling, altruism, as against the predominance of self-love. 
The object of religious reverence is not God, but the 
"Great Being" — Humanity, the society of the noble living 
and the noble dead, the company, or rather the unity, 
of all those who contribute to the better life of man. 
To Humanity we pay our vows, we yield our gratitude, 
we render our homage, we direct our aspirations ; for 
Humanity we act and live in the blessed subordination 
of egoistic desire. Women — the mother, the wife, the 
daughter — purifying through affection the energies of 
man, act, under the Great Being, as angelic guardians, 
accomplishing a moral providence. 

Comte's theory of the three states, theological, meta- 
physical, and positive, was accepted by Pierre Joseph 
Proudhon (1809-65), a far more brilliant writer, a 
far less constructive thinker, and aided him in arriving 
at conclusions which differ widely from those of Comte. 
Son of a cooper at Besancjon, Proudhon had the virtues 
of a true child of the people — integrity, affection, courage, 
zeal, untiring energy. Religion he would replace by 
morality, ardent, strict, and pure. Free associations of 
workmen, subject to no spiritual or temporal authority, 
should arise over all the land. Qu'est-ce que la Propriete? 
he asked in the title of a work published in 1840; and 



362 FRENCH LITERATURE 

his answer was, La Propriete c'est le Vol. Property, seiz- 
ing upon the products of labour in the form of rent or 
interest, and rendering no equivalent, is theft. Justice 
demands that service should be repaid by an equal ser- 
vice. Society, freely organising itself on the principles 
of liberty and justice, requires no government ; only 
through such anarchy as this can true order be at- 
tained. An apostle of modern communism, Proudhon, 
by ideas leavening the popular mind, became no in- 
significant influence in practical politics. 



CHAPTER III 

POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 



The eighteenth century did homage to the reason ; it 
sought for general truths, scientific, social, political ; its 
art was in. the main an inheritance, diminished with lapse 
of time, from the classical art of the preceding century. 
With Rousseau came an outburst of the personal element 
in literature, an overflow of sensibility, an enfranchise- 
ment of the passions, and of imagination as connected 
with the passions ; his eloquence has in it the lyrical 
note. The romantic movement was an assertion of 
freedom for the imagination, and an assertion of the 
rights of individuality. Love, wonder, hope, measure- 
less desire, strange fears, infinite sadness, the sentiment 
of nature, aspiration towards God, were born anew. 
Imagination, claiming authority, refused to submit to 
the rules of classic art. Why should the several literary 
species be impounded each in its separate paddock ? 
Let them mingle at the pleasure of the artist's genius ; 
let the epic and the drama catch what they can of the 
lyric cry ; let tragedy and comedy meet and mix. Why 
remain in servitude to the models of Greece and Rome ? 
Let all epochs and every clime contribute to the enrich- 
ment of art. The primitive age was above all others the 
363 



364 FRENCH LITERATURE 

age of poetry. The great Christian centuries were the 
centuries of miracle and marvel, of spiritual exaltation 
and transcendent passion. Honour, therefore, to our 
mediaeval forefathers ! It is the part of reason to trust 
the imagination in the imaginative sphere. Through 
what is most personal and intimate we reach the truths 
of the universal heart of man. An image may at the same 
time be a symbol ; behind a historical tableau may lie a 
philosophical idea. 

At first the romantic movement was Christian and 
monarchical. Its assertion of freedom, its claims on 
behalf of the ego, its licence of the imagination, were 
in reality revolutionary. The intellect is more aristo- 
cratic than the passions. The great spectacle of modern 
democracy deploying its forces is more moving than any 
pallid ideals of the past ; it has the grandeur and breadth 
of the large phenomena of nature ; it is wide as a sun- 
rise ; its advance is as the onset of the sea, and has like 
rumours of victory and defeat. The romantic move- 
ment, with no infidelity to its central principle, became 
modern and democratic. 

Foreign life and literatures lent their aid to the roman- 
tic movement in France — the passion and mystery of the 
East; the struggle for freedom in Greece; the old ballads 
of Spain ; the mists, the solitudes, the young heroes, the 
pallid female forms of Ossian; the feudal splendours of 
Scott; the melancholy Harold; the mysterious Manfred ; 
Goethe's champion of freedom, his victim of sensibility, 
his seeker for the fountains of living knowledge ; Schiller's 
revolters against social law, and his adventurers of the 
court and camp. 

With the renewal of imagination and sentiment came 
a renewal of language a?nd of metre. The poetical 



POETIC DICTION 

diction of the eighteenth century had grown colourless 
and abstract ; general terms had been preferred to parti- 
cular ; simple, direct, and vivid words had been replaced 
by periphrases — the cock was "the domestic bird that 
announces the day." The romantic poets sought for 
words — whether noble or vulgar— that were coloured, 
concrete, picturesque. The tendency culminated with 
Gautier, to whom words were valuable, like gems, for 
their gleam, their iridescence, and their hardness. Lost 
treasures of the language were recovered j at a later 
date new verbal inventions were made. By degrees, also, 
grammatical structure lost some of its rigidity ; sentences 
and periods grew rather than were built ; phrases were 
alive, and learnt, if there were a need, to leap and bound. 
Verse was moulded by the feeling that inspired it ; the 
melodies were like those of an Eolian harp, long-drawn 
or retracted as the wind swept or touched the strings. 
Symmetry was slighted ; harmony was valued for its 
own sake and for its spiritual significance. Rich rhymes 
satisfied or surprised the ear, and the poet sometimes 
suffered through his curiosity as a virtuoso. By internal 
licences — the mobile cesura, new variations and com- 
binations — the power of the alexandrine was marvel- 
lously enlarged ; it lost its monotony and became 
capable of every achievement ; its external restraints 
were lightened ; verse glided into verse as wave over- 
taking wave. The accomplishment of these changes 
was a gradual process, of which Hugo and Sainte-Beuve 
were the chief initiators. Gautier and, in his elder years, 
Hugo contributed to the later evolution of romantic 
verse. The influence on poetical form of Lamartine, 
Vigny, Musset, was of minor importance. 

The year 1822 is memorable ; it saw the appearance 



366 FRENCH LITERATURE 

of Vigny's Poemes, the Odes of Hugo, which announced 
a new power in literature, though the direction of that 
power was not yet denned, and almost to the same 
moment belongs the indictment of classical literature 
by Henri Beyle (" Stendhal ") in his study entitled 
Racine et Shakespeare, Around Charles Nodier, in the 
library of the Arsenal, gathered the young revolters — 
among them Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Emile Deschamps, 
afterwards the translator of Romeo and Jidiet and Mac- 
beth, his brother Antony, afterwards the translator of the 
Divine Comedy. The first Cenacle was formed ; in the 
Muse Francaise and in the Globe the principles of the 
new literary school were expounded and illustrated. 
Victor Hugo looked on with friendly intentions, but 
still held aloof. 

Jean-Pierre de BEranger (1780-1857) was not one 
of this company of poets. A child of Paris, of humble 
parentage, he discovered, after various experiments, that 
his part was not that of a singer of large ambitions. In 
1815 his first collection of Chansons appeared ; the fourth 
appeared in 1833. Standing between the bourgeoisie and 
the people, he mediated between the popular and the 
middle-class sentiment. His songs flew like town spar- 
rows from garret to garden ; impudent or discreet, they 
nested everywhere. They seemed to be the embodied 
wisdom of good sense, good temper, easy morals, love 
without its ardours, poverty without its pains, patriotism 
without its fatigues, a religion on familiar terms with the 
Dien des bonnes gens. In his elder years a Beranger 
legend had evolved itself ; he was the sage of democracy, 
the Socrates of the people, the patriarch to whom pil- 
grims travelled to receive the oracles of liberal and 
benevolent philosophy. Notwithstanding his faults in 



BERANGER: LAMARTINE 367 

the pseudo-classic taste, Beranger was skilled in the art 
of popular song ; he knew the virtue of concision ; he 
knew how to evolve swiftly his little lyric drama ; he knew 
how to wing his verses with a volent refrain ; he could 
catch the sentiment of the moment and of the multitude ; 
he could be gay with touches of tenderness, and smile 
through a tear reminiscent of 'departed youth and plea- 
sure and Lisette. For the good bourgeois he was a liberal 
in politics and religion ; for the people he was a democrat 
who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than 
liberty, and glorified the legendary Napoleon, repre- 
sentative of democratic absolutism. In the history of 
politics the songs of Beranger count for much ; in the 
history of literature the poet has a little niche of his 
own, with which one may be content who, if he had not 
in elder years supposed himself the champion of a literary 
revolution, might be called modest. 



II 

Among the members of the Cenacle was to be seen a 
poet already famous, their elder by several years, who 
might have been the master of a school had he not 
preferred to dwell apart ; one who, born for poetry, 
chose to look on verse as no more than an accident of 
his existence. In the year 1820 had appeared a slender 
volume entitled Meditations Poetiques. The soul, long 
departed, returned in this volume to French poetry. 
Its publication was an event hardly less important than 
that of the Genie du Chris -tianismc. The well-springs of 
pure inspiration once more flowed. The critics, indeed, 
were not all enthusiastic ; the public, with a surer instinct, 



368 FRENCH LITERATURE 

recognised in Lamartine the singer they had for many 
years desired, and despaired to find. 

Alphonse de Lamartine, born at Macon in 1790, of 
royalist parents, had passed his childhood among the 
tranquil fields and little hills around his homestead at 
Milly. From his mother he learned to love the Bible, 
Tasso, Bernardin, and a christianised version of the 
Savoyard Vicar's faith ; at a later time he read Chateau- 
briand, Rousseau, Milton, Byron, and was enchanted by 
(he wandering gleams and glooms of Ossian. From 
the melancholy of youth he was roused by Italian travel, 
and by that Italian love romance of Graziella, the cir- 
cumstances of which he has dignified for the uses of 
idealised autobiography. A deeper passion of love and 
grief followed ; Madame Charles, the "Julie" of Lamar- 
tine's Raphael, the " Elvire " of his Meditations, died. 
Lamartine had versified already in a manner which has 
affinities with that of those eighteenth -century poets 
and elegiac singers of the Empire whom he was to 
banish from public regard. Love and grief evoked finer 
and purer strains ; his deepest feelings flowed into verse 
with perfect sincerity and perfect spontaneity. Without 
an effort of the will he had become the most illustrious 
poet of France. 

Lamartine had held and had resigned a soldier's post 
in the body-guard of Louis XVIII. He now accepted 
the position of attache to the embassy at Naples ; pub- 
lished in 1823 his Nouvelles Meditations, and two years 
later Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d' Harold (Byron's 
Childe Harold) ; after which followed a long silence. 
Secretary in 1824 to the legation at Florence, he aban- 
doned after a time the diplomatic career, and on the 
eve of the Revolution of July (1830) appeared again as a 



LAMARTINE 369 

poet in his Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses ; travelled 
in the East in company with his wife, and recorded 
his impressions in the Voyage en Orient ; entered into 
political life, at first a solitary in politics as he had been 
in literature, but by degrees finding himself drawn more 
and more towards democratic ideas. " Where will you 
sit ?" he was asked on his presentation in the Chamber. 
His smiling reply, " On the ceiling," was symbolical of 
the fact ; but from " the ceiling " his exalted oratory, 
generous in temper, sometimes wise and well informed, 
descended with influence. Jocelyn (1836), La Chute dun 
Ange (1838), the* Recueillements Poetiques (1839), closed 
the series of his poetical works, though he did not wholly 
cease from song. 

In 1847 Lamartine's idealising Histoire des Girondins, 
brilliant in its romantic portraiture, had the importance 
of a political event. The Revolution of February placed 
him for a little time at the head of affairs ; as he had 
been the soul of French poetry, so for a brief hour 
he was the soul of the political life of France. With 
the victory of imperialism Lamartine retired into the 
shade. He was more than sixty years of age ; he had 
lost his fortune and was burdened with debt. His elder 
years were occupied with incessant improvisations for 
the booksellers — histories, biographies, tales, criticism, 
autobiographic confidences flowed from his pen. It was 
a gallant struggle and a sad one. Through the delicate 
generosity of Napoleon III. he was at length relieved 
without humiliating concessions. In 1869 Lamartine 
died in his eightieth year. 

He was a noble dreamer in practical affairs, and just 
ideas formed a portion of his dreams. Nature had made 
him an irreclaimable optimist ; all that is base and ugly 



370 FRENCH LITERATURE 

in life passed out of view as he soared above earth in his 
luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeed he knew, 
but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there 
were consolations in maternal nature, in love, in reli- 
gious faith and adoration. His power of vision was not 
intense or keen ; his descriptions are commonly vague 
or pale ; but no one could mirror more faithfully a state 
of feeling divested of all material circumstance. The 
pure and ample harmonies of his verse do not attack 
the ear, but they penetrate to the soul. All the great 
lyric themes — God, nature, death, glory, melancholy, 
solitude, regret, desire, hope, love — he interpreted on 
his instrument w T ith a musician's inspiration. Unhappily 
he lacked the steadfast force of will, the inexhaustible 
patience, which go to make a complete artist ; he impro- 
vised admirably ; he refused to labour as a master of 
technique ; hence his diffuseness, his negligences ; hence 
the decline of his powers after the first spontaneous 
inspiration was exhausted. 

Lamartine may have equalled but he never surpassed 
the best poems of his earliest volume. But the elegiac 
singer aspired to be a philosophic poet, and, infusing his 
ideas into sentiment and narrative, became the author of 
Jocelyn and La Chute d'un Ange. Recalling and idealis- 
ing an episode in the life of his friend the Abbe Dumont, 
he tells how Jocelyn, a child of humble parents — not 
yet a priest — takes shelter among the mountains from 
the Revolutionary terror ; how a proscribed youth, 
Laurence, becomes his companion ; how Laurence is 
found to be a girl ; how friendship passes into love ; 
how, in order that he may receive the condemned 
bishop's last confession, Jocelyn submits to become a 
priest ; how the lovers part ; how Laurence wanders 



LAMARTINE 371 

into piteous ways of passion ; how Jocelyn attends her 
in her dying hours, and lays her body among the hills 
and streams of their early love. It is Jocelyn who 
chronicles events and feelings in his journal of joy and 
of sorrow. Lamartine acknowledges that he had before 
him as a model the idyl dear to him in childhood — 
Bernardin's Paid et Virginie. 

The poem is complete in itself, but it was designed 
as a fragment of that vast modern epopee, with humanity 
for the hero, of which La Chute d'un Ange was another 
fragment. The later poem, vast in dimensions, fantastic 
in subject, negligent in style, is a work of Lamar- 
tine's poetic decline. We are among the mountains 
of Lebanon, where dwell the descendants of Cain. 
The angel, enamoured of the maiden Daidha, becomes 
human. Through gigantic and incoherent inventions 
looms the idea of humanity which degrades itself by 
subjugation to the senses, as in Jocelyn we had seen 
the type of humanity which ascends by virtue of aspira- 
tions of the soul. It was a poor jest to say that the 
title of his poem La CJiute d'un Ange described its 
author. Lamartine had failed ; he could not handle so 
vast a subject with plastic power ; but in earlier years 
he had accomplished enough to justify us in disregarding 
a late failure — he had brought back the soul to poetry. 



Ill 

Among the romantic poets who made themselves 
known between 1820 and 1830, Alfred de Vigny is 
distinguished by the special character of his genius, 
and by the fact that nothing in his poetry is derived 



372 FRENCH LITERATURE 

from his contemporaries. Lamartine, Hugo, and, at 
a later d:ite, Musset, found models or suggestions in 
his writings. He, though for a time closely connected 
with the romantic school, really stands apart and alone. 
Born in 1797, ne followed the profession of his father, 
that of arms, and knew the hopes, the illusions, and the 
disappointments of military service at the time of the 
fall of the Empire and the Bourbon restoration. He 
read eagerly in Greek literature, in the Old Testament, 
and among eighteenth-century philosophers. As early 
as 1815 he wrote his admirable poem La Dryade, in which, 
before Andre Chenier's verse had appeared, Chenier's 
fresh and delicate feeling for antiquity was anticipated. 
In 1822 his first volume, Pohnes, was published, includ- 
ing the Helena, afterwards suppressed, and groups of 
pieces classified as Antiques, Judaiques, and Modernes. 
Already his Moise, majestic in its sobriety, was written, 
though it waited four years for publication in the volume 
of Pohnes Antiques et Modernes (1826). Moses climbing 
the slopes of Nebo personifies the solitude and the heavy 
burden of genius; his one aspiration now. is for the 
sleep of death ; and it is the lesser leader Joshua who 
will conduct the people into the promised land. The 
same volume included Eloa, a romance of love which 
abandons joy through an impulse of divine pity : the 
radiant spirit Eloa, born from a tear of Christ, resigns 
the happiness of heaven to bring consolation to the great 
lost angel suffering under the malediction of God. Other 
pieces were inspired by Spain, with its southern violence 
of passion, and by the pass of Roncesvalles, with its 
chivalric associations. 

The novel of Cinq-Mars, which had a great success, is 
a free treatment of history ; but Vigny's best work is 



ALFRED DE VIGNY 373 

rather the embodiment of ideas than the rendering of 
historical matter. His Stella in its conception has some- 
thing of kinship with Moise ; in three prose tales relating 
the sufferings of Chatterton, Chenier, and Gilbert, it illus- 
trates the sorrows of the possessors of genius. Vigny's 
military experience suggested another group of tales, the 
Servitude et Grandeur Militaires ; the soldier in accepting 
servitude finds his consolation in the duty at all costs of 
strenuous obedience. 

In 1827 Vigny quitted the army, and next year took 
place his marriage — one not unhappy, but of imperfect 
sympathy — to an English lady, Lydia Bunbury. His 
interest in English literature was shown by translations 
of Othello and the Merchant of Venice. The former was 
acted with the applause of the young romanticists, who 
worshipped Shakespeare ardently if not wisely, and who 
bore the shock of hearing the unclassical word mouchoir 
valiantly pronounced on the French stage. The triumph 
of his drama of Chatterton (1835) was overwhelming, 
though its glory to-day seems in excess of its deserts. 
Ten years later Vigny was admitted to the Academy. 
But with the representation of Chatterton, and at the 
moment of his highest fame, he suddenly ceased from 
creative activity. Never was his mind more energetic, 
never was his power as an artist so mature ; but, ex- 
cept a few wonderful poems contributed to the Revue 
dcs Deux Mondes, and posthumously collected, nothing 
was given by him to the world from 1835 to 1863, the 
year of his death. 

He had always been a secluded spirit ; external com- 
panionship left him inwardly solitary; secret — so Sainte- 
Beuve puts it — in his " tower of ivory " ; touching some 
mountain-summit for a moment — so Dumas describes 



374 FRENCH LITERATURE 

him — if he folded his wings, as a concession to humanity. 
A great disillusion of passion had befallen him ; but, 
apart from this, he must have retreated into his own 
sphere of ideas and of images, which seemed to him 
to be almost wronged by an attempt at literary expres- 
sion. He looked upon the world with a disenchanted 
eye ; he despaired of the possibilities of life for himself 
and for ail men ; without declamation or display, he re- 
signed himself to a silent and stoical acceptance of the 
lot of man ; but out of this calm despair arose a pas- 
sionate pity for his fellows, a pity even for things evil, 
such as his Eloa felt for the lost angel. La Colore de 
Samson gives majestic utterance to his despair of human 
love ; his Mont des Oliviers, where Jesus seeks God in 
vain, and where Judas lurks near, expresses his religious 
despair. Nature, the benevolent mother, says Vigny, is 
no mother, but a tomb. Yet he would not clamour 
against the heavens or the earth ; he would meet death 
silently when it comes, like the dying wolf of his poem 
{La Mort du Loup), suffering but voiceless. Wealth and 
versatility of imagination were not Vigny's gifts. His 
dominant ideas were few, but he lived in them ; for 
them he found apt imagery or symbol ; and in verse 
which has the dignity of reserve and of passion con- 
trolled to sobriety, he let them as it were involuntarily 
escape from the seclusion of his soul. He is the thinker 
among the poets of his time, and when splendours of 
colour and opulence of sound have passed away, the 
idea remains. In fragments from his papers, published 
in 1867, with the title Journal d'un Poete, the inner history 
of Vigny's spirit can be traced. 



VICTOR HUGO 



IV 



To present Victor Hugo in a few pages is to carve a 
colossus on a cherry-stone. His work dominates half a 
century. In the years of exile he began a new and 
greater career. During the closing ten years his powers 
had waned, but still they were extraordinary. Even 
with death he did not retire ; posthumous publications 
astonished and perhaps fatigued the world. 

Victor- Marie Hugo was born at Besan^on on February 
26, 1802, son of a distinguished military officer — 

" Mon pere vieux soldat, ma mere Vendeenne." 

Mother and children followed Commandant Hugo to 
Italy in 1807 ; in Spain they halted at Ernani and at 
Torquemada — names remembered by the poet; at 
Madrid a Spanish Quasimodo, their school servant, 
alarmed the brothers Eugene and Victor. A schoolboy 
in Paris, Victor Hugo rhymed his chivalric epic, his 
tragedy, his melodrama — "les betises que je faisais avant 
ma naissance." In 1816 he wrote in his manuscript book 
the words, " I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing." 
At fifteen he was the laureate of the Jeux Floraux, the 
"enfant sublime" of Chateaubriand's or of Soumet's 
praise. 

Founder, with his brothers, of the Conservateur Litte- 
raire, he entered into the society of those young aspirants 
who hoped to renew the literature of France. In 1822 
he published his Odes et Poesies Diverses, and, obtaining a 
pension from Louis XVIII., he married his early play- 
fellow Adele Foucher. Romances, lyrics, dramas followed 
in swift succession. Hugo, by virtue of his genius, his 



376 FRENCH LITERATURE 

domineering temper, his incessant activity, became the 
acknowledged leader of the romantic school. In 1841 
he was a member of the Academy ; four years later he 
was created a peer. Elected deputy of Paris in 1848, the 
year of revolution, he sat on the Right in the Con- 
stituant, on the Left in the Legislative Assembly, tending 
more and more towards socialistic democracy. The 
Empire drove him into exile — exile first at Brussels, 
then in Jersey, finally in Guernsey, where Hugo, in his 
own imagination, was the martyred but unsubdued 
demi-god on his sea-beaten rock. In 1870, on the fall 
of the Empire, he returned to Paris, witnessed the siege, 
was elected to the National Assembly, urged a con- 
tinuance of the war, spoke in favour of recognising 
Garibaldi's election, and being tumultuously interrupted 
by the Right, sent in his resignation. Occupied at Brussels 
in the interests of his orphaned grandchildren, he was 
requested to leave, on the ground of his zeal on behalf of 
the fallen Communists ; he returned to Paris, and pleaded 
in the Rappel for amnesty. In 1875 he was elected a 
senator. His eightieth birthday was celebrated with 
enthusiasm. Three years later, on May 23, 1885, Victor 
Hugo died. His funeral pomps were such that one 
might suppose the genius of France itself was about to 
be received at the Pantheon. 

In Victor Hugo an enormous imagination and a vast 
force of will operated amid inferior faculties. His 
character was less eminent than his genius. If it is 
vanity to take a magnified Brocken-shadow for one's self' 
and to admire its superb gestures upon the mist, never 
was vanity more complete or more completely satisfied 
than his. He was to himself the hero of a Hugo legend, 
and did not perceive when the sublime became the 



THE GENIUS OF HUGO 377 

ridiculous. Generous to those beneath him, charitable 
to universal humanity, he was capable of passionate 
vindictiveness against individuals who had wounded his 
self-esteem; and, since whatever opposed him was neces- 
sarily an embodiment of the power of evil, the contest 
rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman. His intellect, 
the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination. 
Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric, 
could pass with him for ideas; but his visions are some- 
times thoughts in images. The voice of his passions was 
leonine, but his moral sensibility wanted delicacy. His 
laughter was rather boisterous than fine. He is a poet 
who seldom achieved a faultless rendering of the subtle 
psychology of lovers' hearts ; there was in him a vein of 
robust sensuality. Children were dear to him, and he 
knew their pretty ways ; a cynical critic might allege 
that he exploited overmuch the tender domesticities. 
His eye seized every form, vast or minute, defined or 
vague ; his feeling for colour was rather strong than 
delicate ; his vision was obsessed by the antithesis of 
light and shade ; his ear was awake to every utterance 
of wind or wave ; phantoms of sound attacked his imagi- 
nation ; he lent the vibrations of his nerves, his own 
sentiments, to material objects ; he took and gave back 
the soul of things. Words for him were living powers; 
language was a moving mass of significant myths, from 
which he chose and which he aggrandised ; sensations 
created images and words, and images and words created 
ideas. He was a master of all harmonies of verse; now 
a solitary breather through pipe or flute ; more often the 
conductor of an orchestra. 

To say that Hugo was the greatest lyric poet of France 
is to say too little ; the claim that he was the greatest 



378 t FRENCH LITERATURE 

lyric poet of all literature might be urged. The power 
and magnitude of his song result from the fact that in it 
what is personal and what is impersonal are fused in one; 
his soul echoed orchestrally the orchestrations of nature 
and of humanity — 

" Son dme aux mille voix, que le Dieu quHl adore 
Mit au centre de tout covime un echo sonore.'' 

And thus if his poetry is not great by virtue of his own 
ideas, it becomes great as a reverberation of the sensa- 
tions, the passions, and the thoughts of the world. He 
did not soar tranquilly aloft and alone ; he was always 
a combatant in the world and wave of men, or borne 
joyously upon the flood. The evolution of his genius 
was a long process. The Odes of 1822 and 1824, the 
Odes et Ballades of 1826, Catholic and royalist in their 
feeling, show in their form a struggling originality op- 
pressed by the literary methods of his predecessors — 
J.-B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Casimir Delavigne. This origin- 
ality asserts itself chiefly in the Ballades. His early prose 
romances, Han d Islande (1823) and Bug-Jargal (1826) — 
the one a tale of the seventeenth-cent lry man-beast of 
Norway, the other a tale of the generous St. Domingo 
slave — are challenges of youthful and extravagant roman- 
ticism. Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne (1829) is a prose 
study in the pathology of passion. The same year which 
saw the publication of the last of these is also the year of 
Les Orientales. These poems are also studies — amazing 
studies in colour, in form, in all the secrets of poetic 
art. The East was popular— Hugo was ever passionate 
for popularity — and Spain, which he had seen, is half- 
Oriental. But of what concern is the East ? he had 
seen a sunset last summer, and the fancy took him ; the 



HUGO'S EARLY WORK 379 

East becomes an occasion for marvellous combinations 
of harmony and lustrous tinctures ; art for its own sake 
is precious. 

From 1827, when Cromwell appeared, to 1843, when 
the epic in drama Les Burgraves failed, Hugo was a 
writer for the stage, diverting tragedy from its true 
direction towards lyrical melodrama. 1 In the operatic 
libretto La Esmeralda (1836) his lyrical virtuosity was 
free to display itself in an appropriate dramatic form. 
The libretto was founded on his own romance Notre- 
Dame de Paris (183 1), an evocation, more imaginative 
than historical, of the old city of the fifteenth century, 
its tragic passions, its strangeness, its horrors, and its 
beauty ; it is a marvellous series of fantasies in black 
and white ; things live in it more truly than persons ; 
the cathedral, by its tyrannous power and intenser life, 
seems to overshadow the other actors. The tale is a 
juxtaposition of violent contrasts, an antithesis of dark- 
ness and light. Through Quasimodo afflicted humanity 
appeals for pity. 

In the volume of verse which followed Les Orientales 
after an interval of two years, Les Feuilles d'Automne 
(1831), Hugo is a master of his instrument, and does not 
need to display his miracles of skill ; he is freer from 
faults than in the poetry of later years, but not there- 
fore more to be admired. His noblest triumphs were 
almost inevitably accompanied by the excesses of his 
audacity. Here the lyrism is that of memory and of 
the heart — intimate, tender, grave, with a feeling for the 
hearth and home, a sensibility to the tranquillising in- 
fluences of nature, a charity for human-kind, a faith in 
God, a hope of immortality. Now and again, as in 

1 See pp. 391-393- 



3 8o FRENCH LITERATURE 

the epilogue, the spirit of public indignation breaks 
forth— 

" Etfajoute a ma lyre une corde dairain" 

The spirit of the Cliants du Crespuscule (1835) is one of 
doubt, trouble, almost of gloom. Hugo's faith in the 
bourgeois monarchy is already waning ; he is a satirist 
of the present ; he sees two things that are majestic — the 
figure of Napoleon in the past, the popular flood-tide in 
the future which rises to threaten the thrones of kings. 
But this tide is discerned, as it were, through a dimness 
of weltering mist. Les Voix Lnterieures (1837) resumes 
the tendencies of the two preceding volumes ; the dead 
Charles X. is reverently saluted ; the legendary Napoleon 
is magnified ; the faith in the people grows clearer ; the 
inner whispers of the soul are caught with heedful ear; 
the voice of the sea now enters into Hugo's poetry ; 
Nature, in the symbolic La Vacke, is the mother and 
the exuberant nurse of all living things. In Les Rayons 
ct les Ombres (1840), Nature is not only the nurse, but the 
instructress and inspirer of the soul, mingling spirit with 
spirit. Lamartine's Le Lac and Musset's Souvenir find a 
companion, not more pure, but of fuller harmonies, in 
the Tristesse d ' Olympio ; reminiscences of childhood are 
magically preserved in the poem of the Feuillantines. 

From 1840 to 1853 Hugo as a lyrical poet was silent. 
Like Lamartine, he had concerned himself with politics. 
\ private grief oppressed his spirits. In 1843 his daughter 
Leopoldine and her husband of a few short months were 
drowned. In 1852 the poet who had done so much to 
magnify the first Napoleon in the popular imagination 
w 7 as the exile who launched his prose invective Napoleon 
le Petit. A year later appeared Les Chatiments, in which 



HUGO'S LATER WORK 381 

satire, with some loss of critical discernment, is infused 
with a passionate lyrical quality, unsurpassed in litera- 
ture, and is touched at times with epic grandeur. The 
Empire, if it severed Hugo from the soil of France, 
restored him to himself with all his superb power and 
all his violences and errors of genius. 

The volumes of Les Contemplations (1856) mark the 
culmination of Hugo's powers as a lyrical poet. The 
earlier pieces are of the past, from 1830 to 1843, and 
resemble the poems of the past. A group of poems, 
sacred to the memory of his daughter, follow, in which 
beauty and pathos are interpenetrated by a consoling 
faith in humanity, in nature, and in God. The concluding 
pieces are in a greater manner. The visionary Hugo lives 
and moves amid a drama of darkness and of light; gloom 
is smitten by splendour, splendour collapses into gloom ; 
and darkness and light seem to have become vocal in 
song. 

But a further development lay before him. The great 
lyric poet was to carry all his lyric passion into an epic 
presentation, in detached scenes, of the life of humanity. 
The first part of La Legende des Siecles was published in 
1859 (later series, 1877, 1883). From the birth of Eve 
to die tiumpet of judgment the vast cycle of ages and 
events unrolls before us ; gracious episodes relieve the 
gloom ; beauty and sublimity go hand in hand ; in the 
shadow the great criminals are pursued by the great 
avengers. The spirit of Les Chatiments is conveyed into 
a view of universal history ; if kings are tyrants and 
priests are knaves, the people is a noble epic hero. This 
poem is the epopee of democratic passions. 

The same spirit of democratic idealism inspires Hugo's 
romance Les J\Iiserables (1862). The subject now is 



382 FRENCH LITERATURE 

modern ; the book is rather the chaos of a prose epic 
than a novel ; the hero is the high-souled outcast of 
society ; everything presses into the pages ; they are turn 
by turn historical, narrative, descriptive, philosophical 
(with such philosophy as Hugo has to offer), humani- 
tarian, lyrical, dramatic, at times realistic ; a vast inven- 
tion, beautiful, incredible, sublime, absurd, absorbing in 
its interest, a nightmare in its tedium. 

We have passed beyond the mid-century, but Hugo is 
not to be presented as a torso. In the tale Les Travail- 
leurs de la Mer (1866) the choral voices of the sea cover 
the thinness and strain of the human voices ; if the 
writer's genius is present in L' Homme qui Rit (1869), 
it often chooses to display its most preposterous atti- 
tudes ; the better scenes of Quatre-vingt Treize (1874) 
beguile our judgment into the generous concessions 
necessary to secure an undisturbed delight. These are 
Hugo's later poems in prose. In verse he revived the 
feelings of youth with a difference, and performed happy 
caprices of style in the Chansons des Rues et des Bois 
(1865) ; sang the incidents and emotions of his country's 
sorrow and glory in L' Annee Terrible (187 2), and — strange 
contrast — the poetry of baby land in L Art d'etre Grand- 
pere (1877). Volume still followed volume — Le Pape, La 
Pitie Supreme -, Religions et Religion, VAne, Les Quatre 
Vents de F Esprit, the drama Torquemada. The best pages 
in these volumes are perhaps equal to the best in any of 
their author's writings ; the pages which force antithesis, 
pile up synonyms, develop commonplaces in endless 
variations, the pages which are hieratic, prophetic, apo- 
calyptic, put a strain upon the loyalty of our admiration. 
The last legend of Hugo's imagination was the Hugo 
legend : if theism was his faith, autotheism was his 



ALFRED DE MUSSET 383 

superstition. Yet it is easy to restort our loyalty, and 
to rediscover the greatest lyric poet, the greatest master 
of poetic counterpoint that France has known. 



V 

Alfred de Musset has been reproached with having 
isolated himself from the general interests and affairs 
of his time. He did not isolate himself from youth 
or love, and the young of two generations were his 
advocates. Born in 1810, son of the biographer of 
Rousseau, he was a Parisian, inheriting the sentiment 
and the scepticism of the eighteenth century. Impres- 
sionable, excitable, greedy of sensations, he felt around 
him the void left by the departed glories of the Empire, 
the void left by the passing away of religious faiths. 
One thing was new and living — poetry. Chenier's re- 
mains had appeared ; Vigny, Hugo, Lamartine had 
opened the avenues for the imagination ; Byron was 
dead, but Harold and Manfred and Don Juan survived. 
Musset, born a poet, was ready for imaginative ven- 
tures ; he had been introduced, while still a boy, to the 
Cenacle. Spain and Italy were the regions of romance ; 
at nineteen he published his first collection of poems, 
Contes d'Espagne et d' Italie, and — an adolescent Cherubin- 
Don Juan of song — found himself famous. 

He gave his adhesion to the romantic school, rather 
with the light effrontery of youth than with depth of 
conviction ; he was impertinent, ironical, incredulous, 
blasphemous, despairing, as became an elegant Byron 
minor of the boulevards, aged nineteen. But some of 
the pieces were well composed; all had the "form and 



384 FRENCH LITERATURE 

feature of blown youth " ; the echoes of southern lands 
had the fidelity and strangeness of echoes tossed from 
Paris backwards ; certain passages and lines had a 
classic grace; it might even be questioned whether the 
Ballade a la Lime was a challenge to the school of tradi- 
tion, or a jest at the expense of his own associates. 

A season of hesitation and of transition followed. 
Musset was not disposed to play the part of the small 
drummer-boy inciting the romantic battalion to the 
double-quick. He began to be aware of his own in- 
dependence. He was romantic, but he had wit and 
a certain intellectual good-sense ; he honoured Racine 
together with Hugo ; he could not merge his individu- 
ality in a school. Yet, with an infirmity characteristic 
of him, Musset was discourarged. It was not in him 
to write great poetry of an impersonal kind ; his Nuit 
Venit'unne had been hissed at the Odeon ; and what had 
he to sing out of his own heart ? He resolved to make 
the experiment. Three years after his first volume a 
second appeared, which announced by its title that, 
while still a dramatic poet, he had abandoned the stage ; 
the Spectacle dans un Fauteuil declared that, though his 
glass was small, it was from his own glass that he would 
drink. 

The glass contained the wine of love and youth 
mingled with a grosser potion. In the drama La Coupe 
ct les Levres he exhibited libertine passion seeking 
alliance with innocence and purity, and incapable of 
attaining self-recovery ; in Namonna, hastily written to 
fit the volume for publication, he presented the pursuit 
of ideal love as conducting its victim through all the 
lures of sensual desire ; the comedy A quoi revent les 
jeunes Filles, with its charm of fantasy, tells of a father's 



MUSSET'S GREATER POETRY 385 

device to prepare his daughters for the good prose of 
wedlock by the poetry of invented romance. Musset 
had emancipated himself from the Cenacle, and would 
neither appeal to the eye with an overcharge of local 
colour, nor seduce the ear with rich or curious rhymes. 
Next year (1833) in the Revue des Deux Mondes appeared 
Rolla, the poem which marks the culmination of Musset's 
early manner, and of Byron's influence on his genius ; 
the prodigal, beggared of faith, debased by self-indulg- 
ence, is not quite a disbeliever in love ; through passion 
he hastens forward in desperation to the refuge of 
death. 

At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in 
Italy. The hours of illusion were followed by months 
of despair. He knew suffering, not through the imagi- 
nation, but in his own experience. After a time calm 
gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue 
of the sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivo- 
lously despairing and elegantly corrupt. In Les Nuits — 
two of these (Mai, Octobre) inspired by the Italian joy and 
pain — he speaks simply and directly from the heart in 
accents of penetrating power. Solitude, his constant 
friend, the Muse, and love rising from the grave of love, 
shall be his consolers — 

" Apres avoir sotcffert, ilfaut souffrir encore ; 
Ilfaut aimer sans cesse, apres avoir aimd? 

Musset's powers had matured through suffering ; the 
Lettre a Lamartine, the Espoir en Dieu, the Souvenir, the 
elegy A la Malibran, the later stanzas Apres une Lecture 
(1842), are masterpieces of the true Musset — the Musset 
who will live. 

At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came 



386 FRENCH LITERATURE 

the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind ; but the years 
were years of lassitude. His patriotic song, Le Rhin 
Allemand, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy received 
him. " Musset s'absente trop," observed an Academi- 
cian ; the ungracious reply, •■ II s'absinthe trop," told 
the truth, and it was a piteous decline. In 1857, attended 
by the pious Sister Marceline, Musset died. 

Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of 
beauty, intelligence, esprit, fantasy, eloquence, graceful 
converse — these were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas ; 
he lacked the constructive imagination ; with great capa- 
cities as a writer, he had too little of an artist's passion 
for perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the Con- 
fession d'un Enfant du Siecle, has borne the lapse of time 
ill. " J'y ai vomi la verite," he said. It is not the happiest 
way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book, 
that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset 
to discover. Some of his shorter tales have the charm 
of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with breathings 
of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a Louis- 
Quinze boudoir. Pierre et Camille, with its deaf-and- 
dumb lovers, and their baby, who babbles in the pre- 
sence of the relenting grandfather " Bonjour, papa," has 
a pretty innocence. Le Fits de Titien returns to the theme 
of fallen art, the ruin of self-indulgence. Frederic et Ber- 
nerette and Mimi Pinson may be said to have created 
the poetic literature of the grisette — gay and good, or 
erring and despairful — making a flower of what had 
blossomed in the stories of Paul de Kock as a weed. 

Next to the most admirable of his lyric and elegiac 
poems, Musset's best Comedies and Proverbes (proverbial 
sayings exemplified in dramatic action), deserve a place. 
Written in prose for readers of the Revue des Deux Motides, 



MUSSET'S DRAMATIC WORK 387 

their scenic qualities were discovered only in 1847, when 
the actress Madame Allan presented Un Caprice and 11 
fant gu'un Porte soit ouverte ou ferine e at St. Petersburg. 
The ambitious Shakespearian drama of political con- 
spiracy, Lorenzaccio, was an effort beyond the province 
and the powers of Musset. His Andre' del Sarlo, a tragic 
representation of the great painter betrayed by his wife 
and his favourite pupil, needed the relief of his happier 
fantasy. It is in such delicate creations of a world of 
romance, a world of sunshine and of perpetual spring, 
as On ne badine pas avec V Amour, Les Caprices de Mari- 
anne, Le Chandelier, II ne faut jurer de rien, that Musset 
showed how romantic art could become in a high sense 
classic by the balance of sensibility and intelligence, of 
fantasy and passion. The graces of the age of Madame 
de Pompadour ally themselves here with the freer graces 
of the Italian Renaissance. Something of the romance 
of Shakespeare's more poetic comedies mingles with the 
artificial elegance of Marivaux. Their subject is love, 
and still repeated love ; sentiment is relieved by the play 
of gaiety ; the grotesque approaches the beautiful ; we 
sail in these light-timbered barques to a land that lies not 
very far from the Illyria and Bohemia and Arden forest 
of our own great enchanter. 



VI 

Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry 
of Musset. Detachment from self and complete sur- 
render to the object is the law of Gautier's most char- 
acteristic work ; he is an eye that sees, a hand that 
moulds and colours — that is all. A child of the South, 



388 FRENCH LITERATURE 

born at Tarbes in 1811, Theophile Gautier was a pupil 
in the painter Rioult's studio till the day when, his friend 
the poet Gerard de Nerval having summoned him to 
take part in the battle of Hernani, he swore by the 
skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a 
defaulter. His first volume, Poesies, appeared in 1830, 
and was followed in two years by Albertus, a fantastic 
manufacture of strangeness and horror, amorous sor- 
cery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The Comedie de la 
Mort evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust, 
Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and 
glory and art and love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm 
was genuine and ardent. The Orientates was his poetic 
gospel ; but the Orientales is precisely the volume in 
which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most 
exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in 
these early poems of Gautier are themes into which 
he works coloured and picturesque details ; sentiment, 
ideas are of value to him so far as they can be ren- 
dered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured 
with vivid pigments. 

It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he 
believed, for poetry, he was forced to toil day after day, 
year after year, as a critic of the stage and of the art- 
exhibitions. He performed his task in workman-like 
fashion, seeking rather to communicate impressions than 
to pronounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of 
literary criticism are his exhumations of the earlier 
seventeenth -century poets — Theophile, Cyrano, Saint- 
Amant, Scarron, and others — published in 1844, together 
with a study of Villon, under the title Les Grotesques, and 
the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with the 
request of the Minister of Public Instruction, on Les 



GAUTIER'S PROSE 389 

Progres de la Pocsie Francaise deptiis i8jo. A reader of 
that memoir to-day will feel, with Swift, that literary 
reputations are dislimned and shifted as quickly and 
softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays 
aloft. 

In 1840 Gautier visited Spain ; afterwards he saw 
Italy, Algeria, Constantinople, Russia, Greece. He 
travelled not as a student of life or as a romantic 
sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all things in 
colour ; the world was for him so much booty for the 
eye. Endowed with a marvellous memory, an unwearied 
searcher of the vocabulary, he could transfer the visual 
impression, without a faltering outline or a hue grown 
dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects which 
he beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was 
in the manner of some admired painter ; he looked on 
nature through the medium of a Zurbaran or a Watteau. 
The dictionary for Gautier was a collection of gems that 
flashed or glowed ; he chose and set them with the skill 
and precision of a goldsmith enamoured of his art. At 
Athens, in one of his latest wanderings, he stood in pre- 
sence of the Parthenon, and found that he was a Greek 
who had strayed into the Middle Ages ; on the faith of 
Notre-Dame de Paris he had loved the old cathedrals ; 
"the Parthenon," he writes, "has cured me of the 
Gothic malady, which with me was never very severe." 

Gautier's tales attained one of their purposes, that of 
astonishing the bourgeois ; yet if he condescended to 
ideas, his ideas on all subjects except art had less value 
than those of the philistine. Mademoiselle de Maupin has 
lost any pretensions it possessed to supereminent immor- 
ality; its sensuality is that of a dream of youth ; such 
purity as it possesses, compared with books of acrid 



390 FRENCH LITERATURE 

grossness, lies in the fact that the young author loved 
Lfe and cared for beauty. In shorter tales he studiously 
constructs strangeness — the sense of mystery he did not 
in truth possess — on a basis of exactly carved and exactly 
placed material. His best invention is the tale of actors 
strolling in the time most dear to his imagination, the 
old days of Louis XIII., Le Capitaine Fracasse, suggested 
doubtless by Scarron's Roman Comiqzie, and patiently 
retouched during a quarter of a century. 

Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces 
of the Emanx et Camees. He is not without sensibility, 
but he will not embarrass himself with either feelings or 
ideas. He has emancipated himself from the egoism of 
the romantic tendency. He sees as a painter or a gem- 
engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions into 
coloured and carven words. That is all, but that is 
much. He values words as sounds, and can combine 
them harmoniously in his little stanzas. Life goes on 
around him ; he is indifferent to it, caring only to fix the 
colour of his enamel, to cut his cameo with unfaltering 
hand. When the Prussian assault was intended to the 
city, when Regnault gave away his life as a soldier, 
Gautier in the Muses' bower sat pondering his epithets 
and filing his phrases. Was it strength, or was it weak- 
ness ? His work survives and will survive by virtue of 
its beauty — beauty somewhat hard and material, but 
such as the artist sought. In 1872 Gautier died. By 
directing art to what is impersonal he prepared the way 
for the Parnassien school, and may even be recognised 
as one of the lineal predecessors of naturalism. 

These — Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier — are 
the names which represent the poetry of nineteenth-cen- 
tury romance ; four stars of varying magnitudes, and one 






THE ROMANTIC DRAMA 391 

enormous cometary apparition. There was also a via 
lactea, from which a well-directed glass can easily dis- 
entangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery : Sainte-Beuve, a 
critic and analyst of moral disease and disenchantment 
in the Vie, Poesies et Pensees de Joseph Delorme; a singer 
of spiritual reverie, modest pleasures, modest griefs, and 
tender memories in the Consolations and the Pensees 
d'AoiU; a virtuoso always in his metrical researches ; 
Auguste Barbier, eloquent in his indignant satires the 
Iambes, lover of Italian art and nature in // Pianto ; 
Auguste Brizeux, the idyllist, in his Marie, of Breton 
wilds and provincial works and ways ; Gerard de Nerval, 
Hegesippe Moreau, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, and 
paler, lessening lights. These and others dwindle for 
the eye into a general stream of luminous atoms. 



VII 

The weaker side of the romantic school is apparent in 
the theatre. It put forth a magnificent programme of 
dramatic reform, which it was unable to carry out. The 
preface to Victor Hugo's Cromwell (1827) is the earliest 
and the most important of its manifestoes. The poetry 
of the world's childhood, we are told, was lyrical ; that 
of its youth was epic ; the poetry of its maturity is 
dramatic. The drama aims at truth before all else ; 
it seeks to represent complete manhood, beautiful and 
revolting, sublime and grotesque. Whatever is found 
in nature should be found in art ; from multiple ele- 
ments an aesthetic whole is to be formed by the sove- 
reignty of imagination ; unity of time, unity of place 
are worthless conventions ; unity of action remains, and 



392 FRENCH LITERATURE 

must be maintained. The play meant to exemplify the 
principles of Hugo's preface is of vast dimensions, in- 
capable of presentation on the stage ; the large painting 
of life for which he pleaded, and which he did not attain, 
is of a kind more suitable to the novel than to the drama. 
Cromwell, which departs little from the old rules respect- 
ing time and place, is a flux and reflux of action, or of 
speeches in place of action, with the question of the 
hero's ambition for kingship as a centre ; its personages 
are lay figures draped in the costumes of historical 
romance. 

The genius of Hugo was pre-eminently lyrical ; the 
movement to which he belonged was also essentially 
lyrical, a movement for the emancipation of the personal 
element in art ; it is by qualities which are non-dramatic 
that his dramas are redeemed from dishonour. When, 
in 1830, his Hernani was presented at the Theatre Fran- 
caij, a strange, long-haired, bearded, -fantastically-attired 
brigade of young supporters engaged in a melee with 
tho^e spectators who represented the tyranny of tradition. 
" Kill him ! he is an Academician," was heard above 
the tumult. Gautier's truculent waistcoat flamed in the 
thickest of the fight. The enthusiasm of Gautier's party 
was justified by splendours of lyrism and of oratory; 
but Flugo's phy \i ill-constructed, and the characters are 
beings of a fantastic world. In Marion Delorme, in Le 
Rot s' amuse, in the prose-tragedy Lucrece Borgia, Victor 
Hugo develops a favourite theme by a favourite method — 
the moral antithesis of some purity of passion surviving 
amid a life of corruption, the apotheosis of virtue dis- 
covered in a soul abandoned to vice, and exhibited in 
violent contrasts. Marion is ennobled by the sacrifice 
of whatever remains to her of honour ; the moral de- 



HUGO'S DRAMATIC WORK 393 

formity of Lucrece is purified by her instinct of maternal 
love ; the hideous Triboulet is beautiful by virtue of his 
devotion as a father. The dramatic study of character 
is too often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. Ruy Bias, 
like Marion Delorme and Hernani, has extraordinary 
beauties; yet the whole, with its tears and laughter, its 
lackey turned minister of state, its amorous queen, is 
an incredible phantasmagoria. Angelo is pure melo- 
drama; Marie Ttidor is the melodrama of history. Les 
Burgraves rises from declamation to poetry, or sinks from 
poetry to declamation ; it is grandiose, epic, or, if the 
reader please, symbolic ; it is much that it ought not 
to be, much that is admirable and out of place ; failing 
in dramatic truth, it fails with a certain sublimity. The 
logic of action, truth of characterisation, these in tragic 
creation are essentials ; no heights or depths of poetry 
which is non-dramatic can entirely justify works which 
do not accept the conditions proper to their kind. 

The tragedy of Torquemada, strange in conception, 
wonderful — and wonderfully unequal — in imaginative 
power, was an inspiration of Hugo's period of exile, 
wrought into form in his latest years. The dramas of 
the earlier period, opening with an historical play too 
enormous for the stage, closed in 1843 with Les Bur- 
graves, which is an epic in dialogue. Aspiring to re- 
volutionary freedom, the romantic drama disdained the 
bounds of art ; epic,, lyric, tragedy, comedy met and 
mingled, with a result too often chaotic. The desired 
harmony of contraries was not attained. Past ages 
were to be revived upon the stage. The historic evoca- 
tion possessed too often neither historic nor human 
truth ; it consisted in " local colour," and local colour 
meant a picturesque display of theatrical bric-a-brac. 



394 FRENCH LITERATURE 

Yet a drama requires some centre of unity. Failing 
of unity in coherent action and well-studied character, 
can a centre be provided by, some philosophical or 
pseuclo- philosophical idea? Victor Hugo, wealthy in 
imagery, was not wealthy in original ideas ; in grandiose 
prefaces he attempted to exhibit his art as the embodi- 
ment of certain abstract conceptions. A great poet is 
not necessarily a philosophical poet. Hugo's interpreta- 
tions of his own art are only evidence of the fact that 
a writer's vanity can practise on his credulity. 

Among the romantic poets the thinker was Vigny. But 
it is not by its philosophical symbolism that his Chatter- 
ton lives ; it is by virtue of its comparative strength of 
construction, by what is sincere in its passion, what is 
genuine in its pathos, and by the character of its heroine, 
Kitty Bell. In the instincts of a dramaturgist both 
Vigny and Hugo fell far short of Alexandre Dumas 
(1803-70). Before the battle of Hernani he had unfolded 
the romantic banner in his Henri III. et sa Cour (1829) ; it 
dazzled by its theatrical inventions, its striking situations, 
its ever-changing display of the stage properties of his- 
torical romance. His Antony, of two years later, parent 
of a numerous progeny, is a domestic tragedy of modern 
life, exhaling Byronic passion, misanthropy, crime, with 
a bastard, a seducer, a murderer for its hero, and for 
its ornaments all those atrocities which fascinate a crowd 
whose nerves can bear to be agreeably shattered. Some- 
thing of abounding vitality, of tingling energy, of im- 
petuosity, of effrontery, secured a career for Antony, the 
Tour de iVes/e, and his other plays. The trade in horrors 
lost its gallant freebootmg airs and grew industriously 
commercial in the hands of Frederic Soulie. When in 
1843 — the year of Hugo's unsuccessful Les Burgraves — 



DELAVIGNE: SCRIBE 395 

a pseudo-classical tragedy, the Lucrke of Ponsard, was 
presented on the stage, the enthusiasm was great ; youth 
and romance, if they had not vanished, were less militant 
than in the days of Hernajii ; it seemed as if good sense 
had returned to the theatre. 1 

Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843) is remembered in lyric 
poetry by his patriotic odes, Les Messeniennes, suggested 
by the military disasters of France. His dramatic work 
is noteworthy, less for the writer's talent than as indi- 
cating the influence of the romantic movement in check- 
ing the development of classical art. Had he been free 
to follow his natural tendencies, Delavigne would have 
remained a creditable disciple of Racine ; he yielded to 
the stream, and timidly approached the romantic leaders 
in historical tragedy. Once in comedy he achieved suc- 
cess ; L'Ecole des Vieillards has the originality of present- 
ing an old husband who is generous in heart, and a 
young wife who is good - natured amid her frivolity. 
Comedy during the second quarter of the century had 
a busy ephemeral life. The name of Eugene Scribe, an 
incessant improvisator during forty years, from 181 1 
onwards, in comedy, vaudeville, and lyric drama, seems 
to recall that of the seventeenth-century Hardy. His 
art was not all commerce ; he knew and he loved the 
stage ; a philistine writing for philistines, Scribe cared 
little for truth of character, for beauty of form ; the 
theatrical devices became for him ends in themselves ; of 
these he was as ingenious a master as is the juggler in 
another art when he tosses his bewildering balls, or 
smiles at the triumph of his inexplicable surprises. 

1 The influence of the great actress Rachel helped to restore to favour the 
classical theatre of Racine and Corneille. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE NOVEL 

I 

The novel in the nineteenth century has yielded itself 
to every tendency of the age ; it has endeavoured to 
revive the past, to paint the present, to embody a social 
or political doctrine, to express private and personal 
sentiment, to analyse the processes of the heart, to 
idealise life in the magic mirror of the imagination. 
The literature of prose fiction produced by writers who 
felt the influence of the romantic movement tended on 
the one hand towards lyrism, the passionate utterance 
of individual emotion— George Sand's early tales are 
conspicuous examples ; on the other hand it turned to 
history, seeking to effect a living and coloured evoca- 
tion of former ages. The most impressive of these 
evocations was assuredly Hugo's Notre- Dame de Paris. 
It was not the earliest ; Vigny's Cinq-Mars preceded 
Notre-Dame by five years. The writer had laboriously 
mastered those details which help to make up the 
romantic mise en scene ; but he sought less to interpret 
historical truth by the imagination than to employ the 
material of history as a vehicle for what he conceived 
to be ideal truth. In Merimee's Chronique de Charles IX. 

(1829), which also preceded Hugo's romance, the histori- 

396 



THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 397 

cal, or, if not this, the archaeological spirit is present ; it 
skilfully sets a tale of the imagination in a framework of 
history. 

Hugo's narratives are eminent by virtue of his ima- 
gination as a poet ; they are lyrical, dramatic, epic ; 
as a reconstitution of history their value is little or 
is none. The historical novel fell into the hands of 
Alexandre Dumas. No one can deny the brilliance, the 
animation, the bustle, the audacity, the inexhaustible 
invention of Les Treis Mousquetaires and its high-spirited 
fellows. There were times when no company was so 
inspiriting to us as that of the gallant Athos, Porthos, 
and Aramis. Let the critics assure us that Dumas' 
history is untrue, his characters superficial, his action 
incredible ; we admit it, and we are caught again by 
the flash of life, the fanfaronade of adventure. We 
throw Eugene Sue to the critics that we may save 
Alexandre Dumas. But Dumas' brain worked faster 
than his hand — or any human hand — could obey its 
orders ; the mine of his inventive faculty needed a com- 
mercial company and an army of diggers for its ex- 
ploitation. He constituted himself the managing director 
of this company ; twelve hundred volumes are said to 
have been the output of the chief and his subordinates; 
the work ceased to be literature, and became mere com- 
merce. The money that Dumas accumulated he reck- 
lessly squandered. Half genius, half charlatan, his genius 
decayed, and his charlatanry grew to enormous propor- 
tions. Protected by his son, he died a poor man amid 
the disasters of the Franco-Prussian war. 



398 FRENCH LITERATURE 

II 

Henri Beyle, who wrote under the pseudonym of 
Stendhal, not popular among his contemporaries, though 
winning the admiration of Merimee and the praise of 
Balzac, predicted that he would be understood about 
i83o. If to be studied and admired is to be understood, 
the prediction has been fulfilled. Taine pronounced him 
the greatest psychologist of the century ; M. Zola, doing 
violence to facts, claimed him as a literary ancestor ; 
M. Bourget discovered in him the author of a nineteenth- 
century Bible and a founder of cosmopolitanism in letters. 
During his lifetime Beyle was isolated, and had a pride 
in isolation. Born at Grenoble in 1783, he had learnt, 
during an unhappy childhood, to conceal his natural 
sensibility ; in later years this reserve was pushed to 
affectation. He served under Napoleon with coolness 
and energy; he hated the Restoration, and, a lover of 
Italian manners and Italian music, he chose Milan for 
his place of abode. The eighteenth-century materialists 
were the masters of his intellect; "the only excuse for 
God," he declared, " is that he does not exist " ; in man 
he saw a being whose end is pleasure, whose law is 
egoism, and who affords a curious field' for studying 
the dynamics of the passions. He honoured Napoleon 
as an incarnation of force, the greatest of the condottieri. 
He loved the Italian character because the passions in 
Italy manifest themselves with the sudden outbreaks of 
nature. He indulged his own passions as a refuge from 
ennui, and turned the scrutiny of his intelligence upon 
every operation of his heart. Fearing to be duped, he 
became the dupe of his own philosophy. He aided the 
romantic movement by the paradox that- all the true 



HENRI BEYLE 399 

classical writers were romantic in their own day — they 
sought to please their time ; the pseudo-classical writers 
attempt to maintain a lifeless tradition. But he had little 
in common with the romantic school, except a love for 
Shakespeare, a certain feeling for local colour, and an 
interest in the study of passion ; the effusion and exalta- 
tion of romance repelled him ; he laboured to be " dry," 
and often succeeded to perfection. 

His analytical study De l' Amour, resting on a sensual 
basis, has all the depth and penetration which is possible 
to a shallow philosophy. His notes on travel and art 
anticipate in an informal way the method of criticism 
which became a system in the hands of Taine ; in a 
line, in a phrase, he resolves the artist into the resultant 
of environing forces. His novels are studies in the 
mechanics of the passions and the will. Human energy, 
which had a happy outlet in the Napoleonic wars, must 
seek a new career in Restoration days. Julien Sorel, the 
low-born hero of Le Rouge et le Noir, finding the red 
coat impossible, must don the priestly black as a cloak 
for his ambition. Hypocrite, seducer, and assassin, he 
ends his career under the knife of the guillotine. La 
Chartreuse de Parme exhibits the manners, characters, 
intrigues of nineteenth-century Italy, with a remarkable 
episode which gives a soldier's experiences of the field 
of Waterloo. In the artist's plastic power Beyle was 
wholly wanting; a collection of ingenious observations 
in psychology may be of rare value, but it does not 
constitute a work of art. His writings are a whetstone 
for the intelligence, but we must bring intelligence to 
its use, else it will grind down or break the blade. In 
1842 he died, desiring to perpetuate his expatriation by 
the epitaph which names him Arrigo Beyle Milanese. 



400 FRENCH LITERATURE 



III 



Lyrical and idealistic are epithets which a critic is 
tempted to affix to the novels of George Sand ; but from 
her early lyrical manner she advanced to perfect idyllic 
narrative ; and while she idealised, she observed, incor- 
porating in her best work the results of a patient and 
faithful study of reality. A vaguer word may be applied 
to whatever she wrote ; offspring of her idealism or her 
realism, it is always in a true sense poetic. 

Luctle-Aurore Dupin, a descendant of Marshal 
Saxe, was born in Paris in 1804, the daughter of Lieu- 
tenant Dupin and a mother of humble origin — a child 
at once of the aristocracy and of the people. Her early 
years were passed in Berri, at the country-house of her 
grandmother. Strong, calm, ruminating, bovine in 
temperament, she had a large heart and an ardent 
imagination. The woods, the flowers, the pastoral 
heights and hollows, the furrows of the fields, the little 
peasants, the hemp-dressers of the farm,, their processes 
of life, their store of old tales and rural superstitions 
made up her earliest education. Already endless stories 
shaped themselves in her brain. At thirteen she was. 
sent to be educated in a Paris convent ; from the bois- 
terous moods which seclusion encouraged, she sank of 
a sudden into depths of religious reverie, or rose to 
heights of religious exaltation, not to be forgotten 
when afterwards she wrote Spiridion. The country 
cooled her devout ardour ; she read widely, poets, his- 
torians, philosophers, without method and with bound- 
less delight ; the Genie du Christianisme replaced the 
Imitation; Rousseau and Byron followed Chateaubriand, 



GEORGE SAND 401 

and romance in her heart put on the form of melan- 
choly. At eighteen the passive Aurore was married to 
M. Dudevant, whose worst fault was the absence of 
those qualities of heart and brain which make wedded 
union a happiness. Two children were born ; and 
having obtained her freedom and a scanty allowance, 
Madame Dudevant in 183 1, in possession of her son and 
daughter, resolved upon trying to obtain a livelihood in 
the capital. 

Perhaps she could paint birds and flowers on cigar- 
cases and snuff-boxes ; happily her hopes received 
small encouragement. Perhaps she could succeed in 
journalism under her friend Delatouche ; she proved 
wholly wanting in cleverness ; her imagination had 
wings ; it could not hop on the perch ; before she had 
begun the beginning of an article the column must 
end. With her compatriot Jules Sandeau, she attempted 
a novel — Rose et Blanche. " Sand " and Sandeau were 
fraternal names ; a countryman of Berri was tradition- 
ally George. Henceforth the young Bohemian, who 
traversed the quais and streets in masculine garb, should 
be George Saxd. 

To write novels was to her only a process of nature; 
she seated herself before her table at ten o'clock, with 
scarcely a plot, and only the slightest acquaintance with 
her characters ; until five in the evening, while her hand 
guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day and the 
next it was the same. By-and-by the novel had written 
itself in full, and another was unfolding. Not that she 
composed mechanically ; her stories were not manu- 
factured; they grew — grew with facility and in free 
abundance. At first, a disciple of Rousseau and 
Chateaubriand, her theme was the romance of love. 



402 FRENCH LITERATURE 

In Indiana, Valentine, Le'lia, Jacques, she vindicated the 
supposed rights of passion. These novels are lyrical 
cries of a heart that had been wounded ; protests 
against the crime of loveless marriage, against the 
tyranny of man, the servitude of woman ; pleas for 
the individualism of the soul — superficial in thought, 
ill-balanced in feeling, unequal in style, yet rising to 
passages of rare poetic beauty, and often admirable in 
descriptive power. The imagination of George Sand had 
translated her private experiences into romance ; yet she, 
the spectator of her own inventions, possessed of a fund 
of sanity which underlay the agitations of her genius, 
while she lent herself to her creations, plied her pen 
with a steady hand from day to day. Unwise and 
blameful in conduct she might be for a season ; she 
wronged her own life, and helped to ruin the life of 
Musset, who had neither her discretion nor her years ; 
but when the inevitable rupture came she could return 
to her better seif. 

Through Andre, Simon, Mauprat — the last a tale of love 
subduing and purifying the savage instincts in man — her 
art advanced in sureness and in strength. Singularly 
accessible to external influences, singularly receptive of 
ideas, the full significance and relations of which she 
failed to comprehend, she felt the force of intelligences 
stronger than her own — of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin, 
of Jean Raynaud, of Pierre Leroux. Mystical religious 
sentiment, an ardent enthusiasm of humanity, mingled 
in her mind with all the discordant formulas of socialism. 
From 1840 to 1848 her love and large generosity of 
nature found satisfaction in the ideals and the hopes of 
social reform. Her novels Consuelo, Jeanne, Le Meunier 
d ' Angibault, Le Peche de M. Antoinc, become expositions 



, 



IDYLLIC TALES 403 

of a thesis, or are diverted from their true development 
to advocate a cause. The art suffers. Jeanne, so admir- 
able in its rural heroine, wanders from nature to humani- 
tarian symbolism ; Consuelo, in which the writer studies 
so happily the artistic temperament, too often loses itself 
in a confusion of ill-understood ideas and tedious de- 
clamation. But the gain of escape from the egoism of 
passion to a more disinterested, even if a doctrinaire, 
view of life was great. George Sand was finding her 
way. 

Indeed, while writing novels in this her second manner, 
she had found her way ; her third manner was attained 
before the second had lost its attraction. La Mare au 
Diable belongs to the year 1846 ; La Petite Fadette, to 
the year of Revolution, 1848, which George Sand, ever 
an optimist, hailed with joy ; Francois le Champi is but 
two years later. In these delightful tales she returns 
from humanitarian theories to the fields of Berri, to 
humble walks, and to the huts where poor men lie. 
The genuine idyll of French peasant life was new to 
French literature ; the better soul of rural France, George 
Sand found deep within herself ; she had read the ex- 
ternal circumstances and incidents of country life with 
an eye as faithful in observation as that of any student 
who dignifies his collection of human documents with 
the style and title of realism in art ; with a 'sense of 
beauty and the instincts of affection she merged herself 
in what she saw ; her feeling for nature is realised in 
gracious art, and her art seems itself to be nature. 

In the novels of her latest years she moved from Berri 
to other regions of France, and interpreted aristocratic 
together with peasant life. Old, experienced, infinitely 
good and attaching, she has tales for her grandchildren, 



404 FRENCH LITERATURE 

and romances — Jean de la Roche, Le Marquis de Villemer, 
and Ihe rest — for her other grandchildren the public. The 
soul of the peasant, of the artist, of the man who must 
lean upon a stronger woman's arm, of the girl — neither 
child nor fully adult — she entered into with deepest and 
truest sympathy. The simple, austere, stoical, heroic 
man she admired as one above her. Her style at its best, 
flowing without impetuosity, full and pure without com- 
motion, harmonious without complex involutions, can 
mirror beauty as faithfully and as magically as an inland 
river. "Calme, toujours plus calme," was a frequent 
utterance of her declining years. " Ne detruisez pas la 
verdure" were her latest words. In 1876 George Sand 
died. Her memoirs and her correspondence make us 
intimate with a spirit, amid all its errors, sweet, generous, 
and gaining through experience a wisdom for the season 
of old age. 



IV 

George Sand may be described as an " idealist," if we 
add the words "with a remarkable gift for observation." 
Her great contemporary HONORE de Balzac is named 
a realist, but he was a realist haunted or attacked by 
phantasms and nightmares of romance. Born in 1799 
at Tours, son of an advocate turned military commis- 
sariat-agent, Honore de Balzac, after some training in 
the law, resolved to write, and, if possible, not to starve. 
With his robust frame, his resolute will, manifest in a 
face coarsely powerful, his large good-nature, his large 
egoism, his audacity of brain, it seemed as if he might 
shoulder his way through the crowd to fortune and to 



HONORE DE BALZAC 405 

fame. But fortune and fame were hard to come at. 
His tragedy Cromwell was condemned by all who saw 
the manuscript ; his novels were published, and lie deep 
in their refuge unde%the waters of oblivion. He tried 
the trades of publisher, printer, type-founder, and suc- 
ceeded in encumbering himself with debt. At length in 
1829 Le Dernier Chouan, a half^historical tale of Brittany 
in 1800, not uninfluenced by Scott, was received with a 
measure of favour. 

Next year Balzac found his truer self, overlaid with 
journalism, pamphleteering, and miscellaneous writing, 
in a Dutch painting of bourgeois life, Le Maison du Chat- 
qui-pelote, which relates the sorrows of the draper's 
daughter, Augustine, drawn from her native sphere by 
an artist's love. From the day that Balzac began to 
wield his pen with power to the day, in 1850, when he 
died, exhausted by the passion of his brain, his own life 
was concentrated in that of the creatures of his imagina- 
tion. He had friends, and married one of the oldest of 
them, Madame Hanska, shortly before his death. Some- 
times for a little while he wandered away from his desk. 
More than once he made wild attempts to secure wealth 
by commercial enterprise or speculation. These were 
adventures or incidents of his existence. That existence 
itself is summed up in the volumes of his Human Comedy. 
He wrote with desperate resolve and a violence of imagi- 
nation ; he attacked the printer's proof as if it were crude 
material on which to work. At six in the evening he re- 
tired to sleep ; he rose at the noon of night, urged on his 
brain with cups of coffee, and covered page after page 
of manuscript, until the noon of day released him. So 
it went on for nearly twenty years, until the intem- 
perance of toil had worn the strong man out. 



406 FRENCH LITERATURE 

There is something gross in Balzac's genius ; he has 
little wit, little delicacy, no sense of measure, no fine 
self-criticism, no lightness of touch, small insight into 
the life of refined society, an img^erfect sense of natural 
beauty, a readiness to accept vulgar marvels as the equi- 
valent of spiritual mysteries ; he is monarchical without 
the sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without 
the sentiment of religion ; he piles sentence on sentence, 
hard and heavy as the accumulated stones of a cairn. 
Did he love his art for its own sake ? It must have been 
so ; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power, 
as the means cf pushing towards fame and grasping gold. 

Within the gross body of his genius, however, an in- 
tense flame burnt. He had a vivid sense of life, a 
perception of all that can be seen and handled, an 
eager interest in reality, a vast passion for things, an in- 
exhaustible curiosity about the machinery of society, a 
feeling, exultant or cynical, of the battle of existence, of 
the conflict for wealth and power, with its triumphs and 
defeats, its display of fierce volition, its pushing aside of 
the feeble, its trampling of the fallen, its grandeur, its 
meanness, its obscure heroisms, and the cruelties of its 
pathos. He flung himself on the life of society with a 
desperate energy of inspection, and tried to make the 
vast array surrender to his imagination. And across his 
vision of reality shot strange beams and shafts of romantic 
illumination — sometimes vulgar theatrical lights, some- 
times gleams like those which add a new reality of wonder 
to the etchings of Rembrandt. What he saw with the 
eyes of the senses or those of the imagination he could 
evoke without the loss of any fragment of its life, and 
could transfer it to the brain of his reader as a vision 
from which escape is impossible. 



BALZAC'S GENIUS 407 

The higher world of aristocratic refinement, the grace 
and natural delicacy of virginal souls, in general eluded 
Balzac's observation. He found it hard to imagine a lady ; 
still harder — though he tried and half succeeded — to con- 
ceive the mystery of a young girl's mind, in which the 
airs of morning are nimble and sweet. The gross bour- 
geois world, which he detested, and a world yet humbler 
was his special sphere. He studied its various elements 
in their environment ; a street, a house, a chamber is as 
much to him as a human being, for it is part of the 
creature's shell, shaped to its uses, corresponding to its 
nature, limiting its action. He has created a population 
of persons which numbers two thousand. Where Balzac 
does not fail, each of these is a complete individual ; in 
the prominent figures a controlling passion is the centre 
of moral life — the greed of money, the desire for distinc- 
tion, the lust for power, some instinct or mania of animal 
affection. The individual exists in a group ; power cir- 
culates from inanimate objects to the living actors of his 
tale; the environment is an accomplice in the action; 
power circulates from member to member of the group; 
finally, group and group enter into correspondence or 
conflict ; and still above the turmoil is heard the ground- 
swell of the tide of Paris. 

The change from the Renes and Obermanns of melan- 
choly romance was great. But in the government of 
Louis-Philippe the bourgeoisie triumphed ; and Balzac 
hated the bourgeoisie. From 1830 to 1840 were his 
greatest years, which include the Peau de Chagrin, Eugenie 
Grandet, La Recherche del'Absolu, LePere Goriot, and other 
masterpieces. To name their titles would be to recite a 
Homeric catalogue. * At an early date Balzac conceived 
the idea of connecting his tales in groups. They acquired 



408 FRENCH LITERATURE 

their collective title, La Comedie Humaine, in 1842. He 
would exhibit human documents illustrating the whole 
social life of his time ; " the administration, the church, 
the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, 
the proletariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, 
the men of letters, the actors, . . . the shopkeepers of 
every degree, the criminals," should all appear in his 
vast tableau of society. His record should include scenes 
from private life, scenes from Parisian, provincial, politi- 
cal, military, rural life, with philosophical studies in nar- 
rative and analytic treatises on the passions. The spirit 
Of system took hold upon Balzac ; he had, in common 
with Victor Hugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with 
the charlatanry of pseudo-ideas ; to observe, to analyse, 
to evoke with his imagination was not enough ; he also 
would be among the philosophers — and Balzac's philo- 
sophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often banal. 
Outside the general scheme of the human comedy lie 
his unsuccessful attempts for the theatre, and the Contes 
Drolatiques, in which the pseudo- antique Rabelaisian 
manner and the affluent power do not entirely atone 
for the anachronism of a grossness more natural in the 
sixteenth than in the nineteenth century. 



Was it possible to be romantic without being lyrical ? 
Was it possible to produce purely objective work, reserv-. 
ing one's own personality, and glancing at one's audience 
only with an occasional look of superior irony ? Such 
was the task essayed by Prosper MerimEe (1803-70). 
W T ith some points of resemblance in character to Beyle,. 



PROSPER ME*RIMEE 409 

whose ideas were influential on his mind, Merimee pos- 
sessed the plastic imagination and the craftsman's skill, 
in which Beyle was deficient. " He is a gentleman," 
said Cousin, and the words might serve for Merimee's 
epitaph ; a gentleman not of nature's making, or God 
Almighty's kind, but constructed in faultless bearing 
according to the rules. Such a gentleman must betray 
no sensibility, must express no sentiment, must indulge 
no enthusiasm, must attach himself to no faith, must be 
superior to all human infirmities, except the infirmity 
of a pose which is impressive only by its correctness ; 
he may be cynical, if the cynicism is wholly free from 
emphasis ; he may be ironical, if the irony is sufficiently 
disguised ; he may mystify his fellows, if he keeps the 
pleasure of mystification for his private amusement 
Should he happen to be an artist, he must appear to 
be only a dilettante. He must never incur ridicule, and 
yet his whole attitude may be ridiculous. 

Such a gentleman was Prosper Merimee. He had 
the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's 
shaping hand. His early romantic plays were put forth 
as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish comedienne. His 
Illyrian poems, La Guzla, were the work of an imaginary 
Hyacinthe Maglanovich, and Merimee could smile gently 
at the credulity of a learned public. He took up the 
short story where Xavier de Maistre, who had known 
how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and 
Charles Nodier, who had given play to a graceful 
fantasy, left it. He purged it of sentiment, he reduced 
fantasy to the law of the imagination, and produced 
such works as Carmen and Colomba, each one a little 
masterpiece of psychological truth, of temperate local 
colour, of faultless narrative, of pure objective art. 



410 FRENCH LITERATURE 

The public must not suppose that he cares for his 
characters or what befell them ; he is an archasologist, 
a savant, and only by accident a teller of tales. Merimee 
had more sensibility than he would confess ; it shows 
itself for moments in the posthumous Lettres a une 
Inconnue ; but he has always a bearing-rein of ironical 
pessimism to hold his sensibility in check. The egoism 
of the romantic school appears in Merimee inverted ; it 
is the egoism not of effusion but of disdainful reserve. 1 

1 It is one of Merimee's merits that he awakened in France an interest in 
Russian literature. 



CHAPTER V 
HISTORY— LITERARY CRITICISM 

I 

The progress of historical literature in the nineteenth 
century was aided by the change which had taken place 
in philosophical opinion ; instead of a rigid system of 
abstract ideas, which disdained the thought of past ages 
as superstition, had come an eclecticism guided by 
spiritual beliefs. The religions of various lands and 
various ages were viewed with sympathetic interest ; 
the breach of continuity from mediaeval to modern 
times was repaired ; the revolutionary spirit of in- 
dividualism gave way before a broader concern for 
society ; the temper in politics grew more cautious 
and less dogmatic ; the great events of recent years en- 
gendered historical reflection ; literary art was renewed 
by the awakening of the romantic imagination. 

The historical learning of the Empire is represented by 
Daunou, an explorer in French literature ; by Ginguene, 
the literary historian of Italy ; by Michaud, who devoted 
his best years to a History of the Crusades. In his De la 
Religion (1824-31) Benjamin Constant, in Restoration 
days, traced the progress of the religious sentiment, 
cleaving its way through dogma and ordinance to a 
free and full development. Sismondi (1773-1842), in 



412 FRENCH LITERATURE 

his Histoire des Francais, investigated such sources as 
were accessible to him, studied economic facts, and in 
a liberal spirit exhibited the life of the nation, and not 
merely the acts of monarchs or the intrigues of states- 
men. His wide, though not profound, erudition com- 
prehended Italy as well as France ; the Histoire des 
Republiques Italiennes is the chart of a difficult labyrinth. 
The method of disinterested narrative, which abstains 
from ethical judgments, propounds no thesis, and aims 
at no doctrinaire conclusion, was followed by Barante 
in his Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne. The precept of 
Ouintilian expresses his rule : " Scribitur ad narrandum, 
non ad probandum." 

Each school of nineteenth-century thought has had its 
historical exponents. Liberal Catholicism is represented 
by Montalembert, Ozanam, De Broglie ; socialism, by 
Louis Blanc; a patriotic Ccesarism, by Thiers; the de- 
mocratic school, by Michelet and Quinet ; philosophic 
liberalism, by Guizot, Mignet, and Tocqueville. 

Augustin Thierry (1795-1856) nobly led the way. 
Some pages of Chateaubriand, full of the sentiment of 
the past, were his first inspiration ; at a later time the 
influence of Fauriel and the novels of Walter Scott, 
"the master of historical divination," confirmed him in 
his sense of the uses of imagination as an aid to the 
scholarship of history. For a time he acted as secretary 
to Saint- Simon, and under his influence proposed a 
scheme for a community of European peoples which 
should leave intact the nationality of each. Then he 
parted from his master, to pursue his way in inde- 
pendence. It seemed to him that the social condition 
and the revolutions of modern Europe had their origins 
in the Germanic invasions, and especially in the Norman 



AUGUSTIN THIERRY 413 

Conquest of England. As he read the great collection 
of the original historians of France and Gaul, he grew 
indignant against the modern travesties named history, 
indignant against writers without erudition, who could 
not see, and writers without imagination, who could not 
depict. The conflict of races — Saxons and Normans in 
England, Gauls and Franks in his own country — re- 
mained with him as a dominant idea, but he would not 
lose himself in generalisations ; he would involve the 
abstract in concrete details ; he would see, and he 
would depict. There was much philosophy in abstain- 
ing from philosophy overmuch. The Lettres sur I' His- 
toire de France were followed in 1825 by the Histoire de 
la Conquete de V Angleterre, in which the art of histo- 
riography attained a perfection previously unknown. 
Through charter and chronicle, Thierry had reached 
the spirit of the past. He had prophesied upon the 
dry bones and to the wind, and the dry bones lived. 
As a liberal, he had been interested in contemporary 
politics. His political ardour had given him that his- 
torical perspicacity which enabled him to discover the 
soul behind an ancient text. 

In 1826 Thierry, the martyr of his passionate studies, 
suffered the calamity of blindness. With the aid of his 
distinguished brother, of friends, and secretaries — above 
all, with the aid of the devoted woman who became his 
wife, he pursued his work. The Feats des Temps Mero- 
vingiens and the Essai sur V Histoire de la Formation du 
Tiers E-tat were the labours of a sightless scholar. His 
passion for perfection was greater than ever ; twenty, 
fifteen lines a day contented him, if his idea was ren- 
dered clear and enduring in faultless form. Paralysis 
made its steady advance ; still he kept his intellect above 



414 



FRENCH LITERATURE 



his infirmities, and followed truth and beauty. On May 22, 
1856, he woke his attendant at four in the morning, and 
dictated with laboured speech the alteration of a phrase 
for the revised Conquete. On the same day, " insatiable 
of perfection," Thierry died. He is not, either in sub- 
stance, thought, or style, the greatest of modern French 
historians ; but, more than any other, he was an 
initiator. 

The life of Francois Guizot — great and venerable 
name — is a portion of the history of his country. Born 
at Nimes in 1787, of an honourable Protestant family, 
he died, with a verse of his favourite Corneille or a text of 
Scripture on his lips, in 1874. Austere without severity, 
simple in habit without rudeness, indomitable in courage, 
imperious in will, gravely eloquent, he had at once the 
liberality and the narrowness of the middle classes, which 
he represented when in power. A threefold task, as he 
conceived, lies before the historian : he must ascertain 
facts ; he must co-ordinate these facts under laws, study- 
ing the anatomy and the physiology of society ; finally, 
he must present the external physiognomy of the facts. 
Guizot was not endowed with the artist's imagination ; 
he had no sense of life, of colour, of literary style ; he 
was a thinker, who saw the life of the past through the 
medium of ideas ; he does not in his pages evoke a 
world of animated forms, of passionate hearts, of vivid 
incidents ; he distinguishes social forces, with a view to 
arrive at principles ; he considers those forces in their 
play one upon another. 

The Histoire Generate de la Civilisation en Europe and 
the Histoire de la Civilisation en France consist of lectures 
delivered from 1828 to 1830 at the Sorbonne. 1 Guizot 

1 The History of Civilisation in France closes with the fourteenth century. 



FRANCOIS GUIZOT 415 

recognised that the study of institutions must be pre- 
ceded by a study of the society which has given 
them birth. In the progress of civilisation he saw not 
merely the development of communities, but also that 
of the individual. The civilisation of Europe, he held, 
was most intelligibly exhibited in that of France, 
where, more than in other countries, intellectual and 
social development have moved hand in hand, where 
general ideas and doctrines have always accompanied 
great events and public revolutions. The key to the 
meaning of French history he found in the tendency 
towards national and political unity. From the tenth 
to the fourteenth century four great forces met in co- 
operation or in conflict— royalty, the feudal system, 
the communes, the Church. Feudalism fell ; a great 
monarchy arose upon its ruins. The human mind 
asserted its spiritual independence in the Protestant 
reformation. The tiers etat was constantly advancing 
in strength. The power of the monarchy, dominant 
in the seventeenth century, declined in the century 
that followed ; the power of the people increased. In 
modern society the elements of national life are reduced 
to two — the government on the one hand, the people 
on the other ; how to harmonise these elements is the 
problem of modern politics. As a capital example for 
the French bourgeoisie, Guizot, returning to an early 
work, made a special study of the great English revolu- 
tion of the seventeenth century. In Germany, of the 
preceding century, the revolution was religious and not 
political. In France, of the succeeding century, the 
revolution was political and not religious. The rare 
good fortune of England lay in the fact that the spirit 
of religious faith and the spirit of political freedom 



416 FRENCH LITERATURE 

ruled together, and co-operated towards a common 
result. 

The work of Francois Mignet (1796-1884), eminent 
for its research, exactitude, clearness, ordonnance, has 
been censured for its historical fatalism. In reality 
Mignei's mind was too studious of facts to be'dominated 
by a theory. He recognised the great forces which 
guide and control events ; he recognised also the power 
and freedom of the individual will. His early Histoire 
de la Revolution Francaise is a sane and lucid arrange- 
ment of material that came to his hands in chaotic 
masses. His later and more important writings deal 
with his special province, the sixteenth century ; his 
method, as he advanced, grew more completely ob- 
jective ; we discern his ideas through the lines of a 
well-proportioned architecture. 

The analytic method of Guizot, supported by a method 
of patient induction, was applied by Alexis de Tocoue- 
ville (1805-59) to the study of the great phenomenon 
of modern democracy. Limiting the area of investiga- 
tion to America, which he had visited on a public 
mission, he investigated the political organisation, the 
manners and morals, the ideas, the habits of thought 
and feeling of the United States as influenced by the 
^democratic equality of conditions. He wrote as a liberal 
in whom the spirit of individualism was active. He re- 
garded the progress of democracy in the modern world 
as inevitable ; he perceived the dangers — formidable for 
society and for individual character— which accompany 
that progress ; he believed that by foresight and wise, 
ordering many of the dangers could be averted. The 
fears and hopes of the citizen guided and sustained in 
Tocqueville a philosophical intelligence. Turning from 



TOCQUEVILLE: THIERS 



417 



America to France, he designed to disengage from the 
tangle of events the true historical significance of the 
Revolution. Only one volume, L'Ancieu Regime et la 
Revolution, was accomplished. It can stand alone as a 
work of capital importance. In the great upheaval he 
saw that all was not progress ; the centralisation of 
power under the old regime remained, and was rendered 
even more formidable than before ; the sentiment of 
equality continued to advance in its inevitable career ; 
unhappily the spirit of liberty was not always its com- 
panion, its moderator, or its guide. 

Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) was engaged at the same 
time as Mignet, his lifelong friend, upon a history of the 
French Revolution (1823-27). The same liberal prin- 
ciples were held in common by the young authors. Their 
methods differed widely : Mignet's orderly and compact 
narration was luminous through its skilful arrangement ; 
Thiers' Histoire was copious, facile, brilliant, more just 
in its general conception than exact in statement, a 
plea for revolutionary patriotism as against the royalist 
reaction of the day, and not without influence in pre- 
paring the spirit of the country for the approaching Re- 
volution of July. His Histoire du Consulat et de I' Empire 
(1845-62) is the great achievement of Thiers' maturity; 
journalist, orator, minister of state, until he became the^ 
chief of stricken France in 187 1 his highest claim to be 
remembered was this vast record of his country's glory. 
He had an appetite for facts ; no detail — the price of 
bread, of soap, of candles — was a matter of indifference 
to him ; he could not show too many things, or show 
them too clearly ; his supreme quality was intelligence ; 
his passion was the pride of patriotism ; his foible was the 
vanity of military success, the zeal of a chauvinist. He 



4i8 FRENCH LITERATURE 

was a liberal ; but Napoleon summed up France, and 
won her battles, therefore Napoleon, the great captain, 
who " made war with his genius and politics with his 
passions," must be for ever magnified. The coup d'etat 
of the third Napoleon owed a debt to the liberal his- 
torian who had reconstructed the Napoleonic legend. 
The campaigns and battle-pieces of Thiers are unsur- 
passed in their kind. His style in narrative is facile, 
abundant, animated, and so transparent that nothing 
seems to intervene between the object and the reader 
who has become a spectator ; a style negligent at times, 
and even incorrect, adding no charm of its own to a 
lucid presentation of things. 

Jules Michelet, the greatest imaginative restorer of 
the past, the greatest historical interpreter of the soul 
of ancient France, was born in 1798 in Paris, an infant 
seemingly too frail and nervous to remain alive. His 
early years gave him experience, brave and pathetic, of 
the hardships of the poor. His father, an unsuccessful 
printer, often found it difficult to procure bread or fire 
for his household ; but he resolved that his son should 
receive an education. The boy, of a fine and sensitive 
organisation, knew cold and hunger ; he watched his 
mother toiling, and from day to day declining in health. 
Two sources of consolation he found — the Imitation, 
which told him of a Divine refuge from sorrow, and the 
Museum of French monuments, which made him forget 
all present distress in visions of the vanished centuries. 
Mocked and persecuted by his schoolfellows, he never 
lost courage, and had the joy of rewarding his parents 
with the cross won by his schoolboy theme. In happy 
country days his aunt Alexis told him legendary tales, 
and read to him the old chroniclers of France. Michelet's 



MICHELET 419 

vocation was before long revealed, and its summons was 
irresistible. 

In 1827 he published his earliest works, the Precis de 
I ' Histoire Modernc, a modest survey of a wide field, in 
which genius illuminated scholarship, and a translation 
of the Sciensa Ntwva of Vico, the master who impressed 
him with the thought that humanity is in a constant pro- 
cess of creation under the influence of the Divine ideas. 
The Histoire Romaine and the Introduction a I' Histoire 
Universelle followed ; the latter a little book, written with 
incredible ardour under the inspiration of the days of 
July. His friend Quinet had taught him to see in his- 
tory an ever-broadening combat for freedom — in Miche- 
let's words, " an eternal July," and the exposition of this 
idea was of the nature of a philosophical entrancement. 

A teacher at the Ecole Normale, appointed chief of 
the historical section of the National Archives in 1831, 
Guizot's substitute at the Sorbonne in 1833, professor 
of history and morals at the College de France in 1838, 
Michelet lived in and for the life of his people and of 
his land. The Histoire de France, begun in 1830, was 
completed thirty-seven years later. After the disasters of 
the war of 1870-71, with failing strength the author 
resumed his labours, endeavouring to add, as it were, an 
appendix on the nineteenth century. 

A passionate searcher among original sources, pub- 
lished and unpublished, handling documents as if they 
were things of flesh and blood, seeing the outward forms 
of existence with the imaginative eye, pressing through 
these to the soul of each successive epoch, possessed by 
an immense pity for the obscure generations of human 
toilers, having, more than almost any other modern writer, 
Virgil's gift of tears, ardent in admiration, ardent in 



420 FRENCH LITERATURE 

indignation, with ideas impregnated by emotions, and 
emotions quickened by ideas, Michelet set himself to 
resuscitate the burjed past. It seemed to him that his 
eminent predecessors — Guizot, Mignet, Thiers, Thierry — 
had each envisaged history from some special point of 
view. Each had too little of the outward body or too 
little of the inward soul of history. Michelet dared to 
hope that a resurrection of the integral life of the dead 
centuries was possible. All or nothing was his word. 
It was a bold venture, but it was a venture, or rather an 
act, of faith. Thierry had been tyrannised by the idea 
of the race : the race is much, but the people does not 
march in the air ; it has a geographical basis ; it draws 
its nutriment from a particular soil. Michelet, at the 
moment of his narrative when France began to have a 
life distinct from Germany, enters upon a survey of its 
geography, in which the physiognomy and the genius 
of each region are studied as if each were a separate 
living creature] and the character of France itself is dis- 
covered in the cohesion or the unity of its various parts. 
Reaching the tenth and eleventh centuries, he feels the 
sadness of their torpor and their violence ; yet humanity 
was living, and soon in the enthusiasm of Gothic art and 
the enthusiasm of the Crusades the sacred aspirations of 
the soul had their manifestation. At the close of the 
mediaeval period everything seems to droop and decay : 
no ! it was then, during the Hundred Years' War, that 
the national consciousness was born, and patriotism was 
incarnated in an armed shepherdess, child of the people. 
By the thirteenth year of his labours — 1843 — Michelet 
had traversed the mediaeval epoch, and reached the close 
of the reign of Louis XL There he paused. Seeing one 
day high on the tower of Reims Cathedral, below which 



MICHELET 



421 



the kings of France received their consecration, a group 
or garland of tortured and mutilated figures carved in 
stone, the thought possessed him that the soul and faith 
of the people should be confirmed within his own soul 
before he could trust himself to treat of the age of the 
great monarchy. He leaped at once the intervening 
centuries, and was at work during eight years — from 
1845 to 1853 — on the French Revolution. He found a 
hero for his revolutionary epic in the people. 

The temper of 1848 was hardly the temper in 
which the earlier Revolution could be judiciously in- 
vestigated. Michelet and Quinet had added to their 
democratic zeal the passions connected with an anti- 
clerical campaign. The violence of liberalism was dis- 
played in Des J estates, and Du Pretre, de la Femme et de la 
Famille. When the historian returned to the sixteenth 
century his spirit had undergone a change : he adored 
the Middle Ages ; but was it not the period of the domi- 
nation of the Church, and how could it be other than 
evil ? He could no longer be a mere historian ; he 
must also be a prophet. The volumes which treat of 
the Reformation, the Renaissance, the wars of religion, 
are as brilliant as earlier volumes, but they are less 
balanced and less coherent. The equilibrium between 
Michelet's intellect and his imagination, between his 
ideas and his passions, was disturbed, if not destroyed. 

Michelet, who had been deprived of his chair in the 
College de France, lost also his post in the Archives 
upon his refusal, in 1852, to swear allegiance to the 
Emperor. Near Nantes in his tempest-beaten home, 
near Genoa in a fold of the Apennines, where he watched 
the lizards sleep or slide, a great appeasement came upon 
his spirit. He had interpreted the soul of the people ; he 



422 FRENCH LITERATURE 

would now interpret the soul of humbler kinsfolk — the 
bird, the insect ; he would interpret the inarticulate soul 
of the mountain and the sea. He studied other docu- 
ments — the documents of nature — with a passion of love, 
read their meanings, and mingled as before his own 
spirit with theirs. L Oiseau, L'Insecte, La Mer, La Mon- 
tague, are canticles in prose by a learned lover of the 
external world, rather than essays in science; often, ex- 
travagant in style, often extreme in sentiment, and un- 
controlled in imagination, but always the betrayals of 
genius. 

Michelet's faults as an historian are great, and such 
as readily strike an English reader. His rash generali- 
sations, his lyrical outbreaks, his Pindaric excitement, 
his verbiage assuming the place of ideas, his romantic 
excess, his violence in ecclesiastical affairs, his hostility 
to our country, his mysticism touched with sensuality, 
his insistence on physiological details, his quick and 
irregular utterance — these trouble at times his imagi- 
native insight, and mar his profound science in docu- 
ments. He died at Hyeres in 1874, hoping that God 
would grant him reunion with his lost ones, and the 
joys promised to those who have sought and loved. 

Edgar Quinet (1803-1875), the friend and brother- 
in-arms of Michelet in his attack upon the Jesuits, born 
at Bourg, of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, 
approached the study of literature and history with that 
tendency to large vues d'ensemble which was natural to 
his mind, and which had been strengthened by disciple- 
ship to Herder. Happy in temper, sound of conscience, 
generous of heart, he illuminated many subjects, and 
was a complete master of none. A poet of lofty inten- 
tions, in his Ahasverus (1833) — the wandering Jew, type 



EDGAR QUINET 423 

of humanity in its endless Odyssey — in his Napoleon, his 
Promethe'e, his vast encyclopaedic allegory Merlin FEn- 
chanteur (i860), his poetry lacked form, and yielded itself 
to the rhetoric of the intellect. 

In the Genie des Religions Quinet endeavoured to 
exhibit the religious idea as the germinative power of 
civilisation, giving its special character to the political 
and social idea. La Revolution, which is perhaps his 
most important work, attempts to replace the Revolu- 
tionary hero-worship, the Girondin and Jacobin legends, 
by a faithful interpretation of the meaning of events. 
The principles of modern society and the principles of 
the Roman Catholic Church, Quinet regarded as incap- 
able of conciliation. In the incompetence of the leaders 
to perceive and apply this truth, and in the fatal logic of 
their violent and anarchic methods, lay, as he believed, 
the causes of the failure which followed the bright hopes 
of 1789. In 1848 Quinet was upon the barricades ; the 
Empire drove him into exile. In his elder years, like 
Michelet, he found a new delight in the study of nature. 
La Creation (1870) exhibits the science of nature and 
that of human history as presenting the same laws and 
requiring kindred methods. It closes with the prophecy 
of science that creation is not yet fully accomplished, and 
that a nobler race will enter into the heritage of our 
humanity. 

II 

Literary criticism in the eighteenth century had been 
the criticism of taste or the criticism of dogma ; in 
the nineteenth century it became naturalistic — a natural 
history of individual minds and their products, a natural 



424 FRENCH LITERATURE 

history of works of art as formed or modified by social, 
political, and moral environments, and by the tendencies 
of races. Such criticism must inevitably have followed 
the growth of the comparative study of literatures in an 
age dominated by the scientific spirit. If we are to name 
any single writer as its founder, we must name Mme. de 
Stael. The French nation, she explained in L' Allemagne, 
inclines towards what is classical ; the Teutonic nations 
incline towards what is romantic. She cares not to say 
whether classical or romantic art should be preferred; it 
is enough to show that the difference of taste results not 
from accidental causes, but from the primitive sources of 
imagination and of thought. 

The historical tendency, proceeding from the eigh- 
teenth century, influenced alike the study of philosophy, 
cf politics, and of literature. While Cousin gave an his- 
torical interpretation of philosophy, and Guizot applied 
history to the exposition of politics, a third eminent 
professor, Abel-Francois Villemain (1790- 1870) was 
illuminating literature with the light of history. An ac- 
complished classical scholar, a student of English, Italian, 
and Spanish authors, Villemain, in his Tableau de la Lit- 
erature au Moyen Age, and his more admirable Tableau de 
la Litterature an- XVIII e Siecle, viewed a wide prospect, 
and could not apply a narrow rule to the measurement 
of all that he saw. He did not formulate a method of 
criticism ; but instinctively he directed criticism towards 
history. He perceived the correspondence between 
literary products and the other phenomena of the age; 
he observed the movement in the spirit of a period; he 
passed from country to country ; he made use of biog- 
raphy as an aid in the study of letters. His learning was at 
times defective ; his views often superficial ; he suffered 



d£sir£ NISARD 425 

from his desire to entertain his audience or to capture 
them by rhetoric. Yet Villemain served letters well, and, 
accepted as a master by the young critics of the Globe, he 
prepared the way for Sainte-Beuve. 

While such criticism as that of Villemain was main- 
tained by Saint-Marc Girardin (1801-73), professor of 
French poetry at the Sorbonne, the dogmatic or doc- 
trinaire school of criticism was represented with rare 
ability by D£sir£ Nisard (1806-88). His capital work, 
the Histoire de la Litterature Francaise, the labour of 
many years, is distinguished by a magisterial application 
of ideas to the decision of literary questions. Criticism 
with Nisard is not a natural history of minds, nor a 
study of historical developments, so much as the judg- 
ment of literary art in the light of reason. He confronts 
each book on which he pronounces judgment with that 
ideal of its species which he has formed in his own mind : 
he compares it with the ideal of the genius of France, 
which attains its highest ends rather through discipline 
than through freedom ; he compares it with the ideal of 
the French language ; finally, he compares it with the 
ideal of humanity as seen in the best literature of the 
world. According to the result of the comparison he 
delivers condemnation or awards the crown. In French 
literature, at its best, he perceives a marvellous equi- 
librium of the faculties under the control of reason ; 
it applies general ideas to life ; it avoids individual 
caprice ; it dreads the chimeras of imagination ; it 
is eminently rational ; it embodies ideas in just and 
measured form. Such literature Nisard found in the 
great age of Louis XIV. Certain gains there may have 
been in the eighteenth century, but these gains were 
more than counterbalanced by losses. To disprove the 



4 26 FRENCH LITERATURE 

saying that there is no disputing about tastes, to estab- 
lish an order and a hierarchy in letters, to regulate 
intellectual pleasures, was Nisard's aim ; but in attempt- 
ing to constitute an exact science founded upon general 
principles, he too often derived those principles from 
the attractions and repulsions of his individual taste. 
Criticism retrograded in his hands ; yet, in retrograding, 
it took up a strong position : the influence of such a 
teacher was not untimely when facile sympathies re- 
quired the guidance or the check of a director. 

The admirable critic of the romantic school, Charles- 
Augustix Sainte-Beuve (1804-69), developed, as time 
went on, into the great critic of the naturalistic method. 
In his Tableau de la Poesie Francaise au XVI e Steele he 
found ancestors for the romantic poets as much older 
than the ancestors of classical art in France as Ronsard 
is older than Malherbe. Wandering endlessly from 
author to author in his Portraits Litteraires and Por- 
traits Contemporains, he studied in all its details what 
we may term the physiology of each. The long research 
of spirits connected with his most sustained work, Port- 
Royal, led him to recognise certain types or families 
under which the various minds of men can be grouped 
and classified. During a quarter of a century he inves- 
tigated, distinguished, defined in the vast collection of 
little monographs which form the Causeries du Lundi 
and the Nouveaux Lundis. They formed, as it were, a 
natural history of intellects and temperaments ; they 
established a new method, and illustrated that method 
by a multitude of examples. 

Never was there a more mobile spirit; but he was as 
exact and sure-footed as he was mobile. When we have 
allowed for certain personal jealousies or hostilities, and 



SAINTE-BEUVE 427 

for an excessive attraction towards what may be called 
the morbid anatomy of minds, we may give our con- 
fidence with scarcely a limit to the psychologist critic 
Sainte-Beuve. Poet, novelist, student of medicine, scep- 
tic, believer, socialist, imperialist — he traversed every 
region of ideas ; as soon as he understood each posi- 
tion he was free to leave it behind. He did not pretend 
to reduce criticism to a science ; he hoped that at length, 
as the result of numberless observations, something like 
a science might come into existence. Meanwhile he 
would cultivate the relative and distrust the absolute. 
He would study literary products through the persons 
of their authors ; he would examine each detail ; he 
would inquire into the physical characteristics of the 
subject of his investigation ; view him through his an- 
cestry and among his kinsfolk ; observe him in the 
process of education ; discover him among his friends 
and contemporaries ; note the moment when his genius 
first unfolded itself ; note the moment when it was first 
touched with decay ; approach him through admirers 
and disciples ; approach him through his antagonists or 
those whom he repelled ; and at last, if that were pos- 
sible, find some illuminating word which resumes the 
results of a completed study. There is no " code Sainte- 
Beuve" by which off-hand to pronounce literary judg- 
ments ; a method of Sainte-Beuve there is, and it is the 
method which has best served the study of literature in 
the nineteenth century. 



Here this survey of a wide field finds its limit. The 
course of French literature since 1850 may be studied in 
current criticism ; it does not yet come within the scope 



428 FRENCH LITERATURE 

of literary history. The product of these years has been 
manifold and great ; their literary importance is attested 
by the names — among many others — of Leconte de Lisle, 
Sully Prudhomme, Verlaine, in non- dramatic poetry; 
of Augier and the younger Dumas in the theatre ; of 
Flaubert, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Zola, Daudet, 
Bourget, Pierre Loti, Anatole France, in fiction ; of Taine 
and Renan in historical study and criticism ; of Fromentin 
in the criticism of art ; of Scherer, Brunetiere, Faguet, 
Lemaitre, in the criticism of literature. 

The dominant fact, if we discern it aright, has been 
the scientific influence, turning poetry from romantic 
egoism to objective art, directing the novel and the 
drama to naturalism and to the study of social environ- 
ments, informing history and criticism with the spirit 
of curiosity, and prompting research for laws of evolu- 
tion. Whether the spiritualist tendency observable at 
the present moment be a symptom of languor and fatigue, 
or the indication of a new moral energy, future years will 
determine. 






BIBLIOGRAPHY 



The following notes are designed as an indication of some books 
which may be useful to students. 

Of the many Histories of French Literature the fullest and most 
trustworthy is that at present in course of publication under the 
editorship of M. Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la 
Litterature frangaise (A. Colin et Cie.). M. Lan son's Histoire de 
la Litterature francaise should be in the hands of every student, 
and this may be supplemented by M. Lintilhac's Litterature 
francaise (2 vols^j. 

The works of Mr. Saintsbury, Geruzez, Demogeot, are widely 
known, and have proved useful during many years. Much may 
be learn£-and learnt pleasantly from Paul Albert's volumes on the 
literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nine- 
teenth centuries. Two volumes out of five of M. Charles Gidel's 
Histoire de la Litterature francaise (Lemerre) are occupied with 
literature from 1815 to 1886., M. Hermann Pergamini's Histoire 
generale de la Litterature francaise (Alcan) sometimes gives fresh 
and interesting views. For a short school history by an accom- 
plished scholar, none is better than M. Petit de Julleville's Histoire 
de la Litterature francaise, which, in 5 5 5 pages, packs a great deal 
of information. The Histoire elementaire de la Litterature fran- 
caise, by M. Jean Fleury, has been popular ; it tells much of the 
contents of great books, and makes no assumption that the reader is 
already acquainted with them. Dr. Warren's A Primer of French 
Literature (Heath, Boston, U.S.A.) is well proportioned and well 
arranged, but it has room for little more than names, dates, and 
the briefest characterisations. Dr. Wells's Modern French Litera- 
ture (Roberts, Boston, U.S.A.) sketches French literature to 
429 



430 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Chateaubriand, and treats with considerable fulness the literature 
from Chateaubriand and Mme. de Stael to the present time. For 
the present century M. G. Pellissier's Le Mouvement litteraire au 
XIX' Siecle is valuable. 

Of elder histories that by Nisard is by far the most distinguished, 
the work of a scholar and a thinker. (See p. 425 of the present 
volume.) 

The student will find Merlet's Etudes litteraires sur les 
Classiqices franfais (2 vols.), revised and enlarged by M. Lintilhac, 
highly instructive; the second volume is wholly occupied with 
Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. 

For the history of the French theatre the best introduction is 
M. Petit de Julleville's Le Theatre en France ; it may be sup- 
plemented by M. Brunetiere's Les Epoques du Theatre frangais. 
Learning wide and exact, and original thought, characterise all the 
work of M. Brunetiere ; each of his many volumes should be 
searched by the student for what he may need. The studies of 
M. Faguet on the writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, 
and nineteenth centuries are the work of a critic who is penetrat- 
ing in his psychological study of authors, and who, just or unjust, 
is always suggestive. For numberless little monographs the student 
may turn to Sainte-Beuve. Monographs on a larger scale will be 
found in the admirable series of Grands Ecrivains francais 
(Hachette) ; the Classiques popu!aires (Lecene, Oudin et Cie.) 
are in some instances no less scholarly. The writings of Scherer, 
of M. Jules Lemaitre, and of M. Anatole France are especially 
valuable on nineteenth-century literature. The best study of 
French historical literature is Professor Flint's The Philosophy of 
History (1893). 

Provided with such books as these the student will hardly need 
the general histories of French literature by German writers. I 
may name Prof. Bornhak's Geschichte der Franzosischen Literatur, 
and the more popular history by Engel (4th ed., 1897). Lotheissen's 
Geschichte der Franzosischen Literatur im XVLI. Jahrhundert 
seems to me the best book on the period. The monographs in 
German are numberless. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



431 



The editions of authors in the Grands Ecrivains de la France 
are of the highest authority. The best anthology of French poetry 
is Crepet's Les Poeles francais (4 vols.). Small anthologies of 
French poetry since the fifteenth century, and of French lyrical 
poets of the nineteenth century, are published by Lemerre. 

The list which follows is taken partly from books which I have 
used in writing this volume, partly from the Bibliography in M. 
Lintilhac's Histoire de la Litter ature fran$aise. To name English 
writers and books seems unnecessary. 

THE MIDDLE AGES 

Histoire litteraire de la France (a vast repertory on mediaeval 

literature). 
Gaston Paris. La Litterature francaise au moyen Age. 1890. 
Aubertin. Hist, de la Langue et de la Litt. francaises au moyen 
Age. 2 vols. 18S3. 
— -G. Paris. La Poesie du moyen Age. 2 vols. 1887. 
-'LEON Gautier. Les Epopees franqaises. 2nd edition. 4 vols. 
1878-94. 
J. Bedier. Les Fabliaux, Etudes de Litt. populaire et d Histoire litt. 

du moyen Age. 1895. 
L. Stjdre. Les Sources du Roman de Renart. 1893. 
Lenient. La Satire e?i France ate moyen Age. 1883. 
'*" E. Langlois. Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose. 1890. 
A. Debidour. Les Chro7iiqueurs. 2 vols. 1892. (Classiques 
populaires.) 
_.- A. Jeanroy. Les Origines de la Poesie lyrique e7i France. 1889. 

Cledat. Rutebeuf. 1891. (CranOs Ecrivains fr.) 
.- Mary Darmesteter. Froissart. 1894 {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
A. Sarradin. Eustache Des champs. 1879. 

C. Beaufils. Etude sur la Vie et les Poesies de Charles d : 'Orleans. 
1861. 
— A. Campaux. Francois Villon. 1859. 
-- A. Longnon. Etude biographique sur. Fr. Villon. 1877. 
Lecoy de LA Marche. La Chairefr. au moyen Age. 1886. 
Petit de Julleville. Les Mysteres. 2 vols. 1880. 

„ „ Les Comidiens en Fr. au moyen Age. 1885. 

„ „ La Come'die et les Mosurs en France au 

moyen Age. 1886. 



432 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Petit DE Julleville. Repertoire du Theatre comique en France au 

moyen Age. 1885. 
Faguet. XVI e Steele. 1894. (On Commines.) 
Merlet. Etudes litt. (On Villehardouin, Froissart, Commines.) 

Edited by Lintilhac. 1894. 
L. Cledat. La Poe'sie die moyen Age. 1893. (Classiques popu- 

1 aires.) 



SIXTEENTH CENTURY 

A. Darmesteter et A. Hatzfeld. Le XVF Steele en France. 

1878. 
Faguet. X VF Steele. 1894. 
Sainte-Beuve. Tableau historique et critique de la Poe'sie fr. au 

XVI' Siecle. 
L. FEUGERE. Caracleres et Portraits Hit. du XVP Siecle. 1859. 
Egger. F 'Hellenisme en France. 1869. 
Taguet. La Tragediefr. an XVI 6 Siecle. 1883. 
E. Chasles. La Comedie en France au XVF Siecle. 1862. 
E. Bourciez. Les Mceurs polies et la Litt. de Cour sous Henri II. 

1886. 
P. Stapfer. Rabelais. 1889. 
~R. Millet. Rabelais. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

E. Gebhart. Rabelais, la Renaissance et la Reforme. 1895. 
Haag ET Bordier. La Fratice protestante. 2nd edition. (Vols. 

i.-vi. have appeared.) 

F. Bungener. Calvin, sa Vie, son CEuvre et ses Ecrits. 1862. 

A. BlRSCH-HlRSCHFELD. Geschichte der Franzosischen Litteratur y 
seit An fang des XVI. Jahriiunderts. Erster Band : Das Zeitalter 
der Renaissance. 1 8S9. 

EberT. Entwickelungs-Geschichte der Fr. Tragodie, vorndmlich im 
XVI. Jahrhundert. 1856. 

F. Godefroy. Histoire de la Litt.fr. depuis le XVF Siecle jusqu 'd 

110s Jours. 1878. 

G. Merlet. Les grands Ecrivains du XVI 6 Siecle. 1875. 

C Lenient. La Satire en France, ou la Litt. militante au XVI e Siecle. 

1886. 
E. COUGNY. Guillaume du Vair. 1857. 
A. Sayous. Etudes litt. sur les Ecrivains fr. de la Reformation. 

1854. 



I 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 433 

A. VlNET. Moralistes des XVP et XVII' Siecles. 1859. 
P. Stapfer. Montaigne. 1895. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
P. Bonnefon. Montaigne, V Homme et VGLuvre. 1893. 
Saint-Marc Girardin. Tableau de la Litt. fr. au XVP Steele. 

1862. 
Ch. Normand. Monluc. {Classiques populaires.) 
G. BIZOS. Ronsard. {Classiques populaires.) 
Geruzez. Essais d'Histoire litt. 1853. 
P. Morillot. Discours surlaVie et lesCEuvres d Agrippa d Aubigne'. 

1884. 
H. PERG AMINE La Satire au X VP Sihle et les Tragiques dAgrippa 

d'Aubignd. 1881. 



SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

F. LOTHEISSEN. Geschichte der Franzosischen Litteratur im XVII. 

Jahrhundert. 2 vols. 1897. 
A. Dupuy. Histoire de la Litt.fr. au XVII* Siecle. 1892. 
Le R. Pere G. Longhaye. Histoire de la Litt.fr. au XVH e Siecle. 

1895. 
J. DEMOGEOT. Tableau de la Litt. fr. au XVH e Sihle avant Cor- 

neille et Descartes. 1859. 
LE Due DE Broglie. Malherbe. 1897. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
V. COUSIN. La Societi fr.au XVII* Siecle. 1858. 
„ Mtne. de Sable. 1882. 

» Jacqueline Pascal. 1878. 

„ Lajeutiesse de Mine, de Longueville. 1853. 

„ Mme. de Longueville et la Fronde. 1859. 

G. LARROUMET. Introduction to edition of Les Pricieuses ridicules. 

1884. 
A. le Breton. Le Roman au X VIP Siecle. 1890. 
Sainte-Beuve. Portraits de Femmes. 1855. 
A. BOURGOIN. Valentin Conrart. 1883. 

„ Les Maitres de la Critique au XVI P Siecle. 1889. 

PELLISSON et d'Olivet. Histoire de PA eddemiefr. 2 vols. 1858. 
E. ROY. Etude sur Charles Sorel. 1893. 
P. MORILLOT. Scarron et le Genre burlesque. 1888. 

„ Le Roman en France depuis 1610 jusqu'd nos 

Jours, 
A. Fouillee. Descartes. 1893. {Grands JEcrivains fr.) 



434 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

F. BouiLLIER. Histoire de la Philosophie cartesienne. 2 vols. 

1868. 
E. RlGAL. Alexandre Hardy et le Theatre fr. 1889. 

,, Esquisse dhine Histoire des Theatres de Paris de 1 548 a 

1635. 1887. 
Guizot. Corneille et son Temps. 1880. 

G. REYNIER. Thomas Corneille, sa Vie et son Theatre. 1892. 
P. MONCEAUX. Racine. {Classiques populaires.) 
Sainte-Beuve. Port-Royal. 7 vols. 1888. 

E. Deschanel. Le Romantis7ne des Classiques. 1883. 

P. Stapfer. Racine et Victor Hugo. 1887. 

G. Larroumet. La Comddie de Moliere. 1889. 

H. DuRAND. Moliere. 1889. {Classiques populaires!) 

Mahrenholtz. Molieres Leben und Werke. 1881. 

V. Fournel. Le Theatre au XVIL e Siecle: la Comedie. 1888. 

H. Rigault. Hist, de la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. 
1856. 

P. MORILLOT. Boileau. {Classiques populaires.) 
•G. Lanson. Boileau. 1892. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

G. Lafenestre. La Fontaine. 1895. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

. H. Taine. La Fontaine et ses Fables, 1879. 

Prevost-Paradol. Les Moralistes fr. 1865. 

P. Janet. Les Passions et les Caracteres dans la Litt. du XVLP 
Siecle. 1888. 

PELLISSON. La Bruyere. 1892. {Classiques populaires.) 

Jacquinet. Des Predicateurs du XVIP Siecle avant Bossuet. 
1863. 

G. LANSON. Bossuet. 1891. {Classiques populaires.) 

A. FEUGERE. Bourdaloue, sa Predication et son Temps. 1874. . 

LEHANNEUR. Mascaron. 1878. 

L'Abbe Fabre. F techier orateur. 1885. 

L'Abbe Bayle. Massillon. 1867. 

G. Bizos. Fenelon. 1887. {Classiques populaires.) 

P.Janet. Fe'nelon. 1892. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

R. VAELERY Radot. Mine, de Sevigne. 1888. {Classiques popu- 
laires.) 

G. BOISSIER. M me. de Sevigne. 1887. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

CTE. D'HAUSSONVILLE. M7ne.de la Fayette. 1 891. {Grands Etri- 
vainsfr.) 

G. BoiSSlER. Saint-Simon. 1892. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

J. BoURDEAU. La Rochefoucauld. 1895. {Grands Ecrivains fr) 









BIBLIOGRAPHY 435 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

H. Hettner. LiteraturgeschicJitc des achizehnten fahrhunderts : 

Z we iter Theil. 1872. 
VlLLEMMN. Tableau de la Litt.au XVIII 6 Sihle. 4 vols. 1841. 
De BARANTE. Tableau de la Lilt. fr. au XVIII* Siecle. 1856. 
Bersot. Etudes sur le XVIII* SieJe. 1852. 
.VlNET. Mist, de la Litt.fr. an XVIII* Siecle. 1853. 
J. Barni. Hist, des Ide'es morales etpolitiques e7i France au XVIII* 

Siecle. 1865. 
Caro. La Fin du X VIII* Siecle. 1 88 1 . 

Taine. Les Origines de la France contemporaitie. 1882. (Vol. i.). 
A. SOREL. Montesquieu. 1889. (Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
H. Leeasteur. Buffon. 1888. {Classiques populaircs.) 
M. Paleologue. Vauvenargues. 1890. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
G. Desnoiresterres. Voltaire et la Societe au XVIII* Siecle. 

8 vols. 1871-76. 
E. Faguet. Voltaire. 1895. {Classiques populaires.) 
A. CHUQUET. J. -J. Rousseau. 1893. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
H. BEAUDOUIN. La Vie et les GLuvres dej.-f. Rousseau. 1871. 
Saint-Marc Girardin. J.-J. Rousseau, sa Vie et ses Ouvrages. 

2 vols. 1S75. 
Ch. Lenient. La Comedie en France au XVIII* Siecle. 2 vols, 

1888. 
E. LlNTlLHAC. Lesage. 189^. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

,, ,, Beaumar chats et ses Ouvres. 1887. 

A. Hallays. Beaumarchais. 1897. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
Leo C LA ret if.. Essai sur Lesage romancier. 1850. 

„ ,, Florian. 18S8. {Classiques populaires) 

G. LARROUMET. Marivaux, sa Vie et ses CEuvres. 1882. 
-J. Reinach. Diderot. 1894. {Grands Ecrivains fr) 
J. Bertrand. HAlembert. 1889. {Grands Ecrivains fr?) 
L. Say. Turgot. 1889. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 



REVOLUTION AND NINETEENTH CENTURY 

E. GERUZEZ. Hist, de la Litt. fr. pendant la Revolution. 1881. 
E. ROUSSE. Mirabeau. 1891. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
De Lescure. Rivarol et la Societe fr. pendant la Revolution et 
P Emigration. 1883. 



436 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

De LESCURE. Bernardm de Saint-Pierre. {Classiques populaires!) 

„ ,, Chateaubriand. 1892. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

G. MERLET. Tableau de la Litt. fr. 1 800-1 8 15. 1883. 
Arvede Barine. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. 1892. {Grands 

Ecrivains fr. ) 
Sainte-Beuve. Chateaubriand et son Groupe litt. 2 vols. 1889. 
A. BARDOUX. Chateaubriand. 1893. {Classiques populaires.) 
A. SOREL. Mme. de Stael. 1893. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
G. Brandes. Die Haupfstrbmungen der Litteraiur des 19 Jahr- 

hundert. Vol. v. 1894. 
E. Faguet. Politiques et Moralistes du XIX e Siecle. 1891. 
G. Pellissier. Le Mouvement litteraire au XIX e Siecle. 1893. 
Th. Gautier. Histoire de Romantisme. 1874. 
E. Rod. Lamartine. 1893. {Classiques populaires.) 
'E. DESCHANEL. Lamartine. 2 vols. 1893. 
"E. Eire. Victor Hugo avant 1830. 1883. 
E. DUPUY. V. Hugo, f Homme et le Poete. 18S7. 
M. Paleologue. Alfred de Vigny. 1891. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
Dorison. Alfred de Vigny, Poete et Philosophe. 1892. 
A. Barine. Alfred de Musset. 1893. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
A. Claveau. Alfred de Musset. {Classiques populaires.) 
M. DU CAMP. Theophile Gautier. 1890. {Gra?ids Ecrivains fr.) 
G. Cogordan. Joseph de Maistre. 1894. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
E. SPULLER. Lamc7inais, sa Vie et ses CEuvres. 1 893. 
J. Simon. Victor Cousin. 18S7. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
E. Caro. George Sand. 1887. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

E. Rod. Stendhal. 189?. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 

F. Correard. Michelef. 1887. {Classiques populaires.) 
P. de Remusat. Thiers. 1889. {Grands Ecrivains fr.) 
E. ZEVORT. Thiers. 1892. {Classiques populaires.) 

A. FiLON. Me'rime'e et ses Amis. 1894. 

Brunetiere. V Evolution de la Poe'sie lyrique en France au XIX* 
Siecle. 2 vols. 1894. 









INDEX 



Abondance, Jean d', 75 
Adam de la Halle, 26, 27, 72 
Alarcon, 167 
AlbeYic de Briancon, 17 
Alexis, Vie de Saint, 4 
Amadis des Gaules, 23, 92 
Amis et Amiles, 12 
Amyot, Jacques, 96-97 
Andrieux, 336 
Anne of Austria, 201 
Argenson, Marquis d', 304 note 
Armentieres, Peronne d', 59 
Arnauld, Antoine, 153, 156-157, 

185,215 
Arnauld, Jacqueline, 155 
Arnault, 335 
Arouet, see Voltaire 
Aubigne\ Agrippa d', 112, 113, 

117-119 
Ancassin et Nicolette, 22 
Aulnoy, Mme. d', 243 
Auvergne, Martial d', 63 

Ba'if, Antoine de, 98, 103 
Ballanche, 357 
Baltus, 245 

Balzac, Guez de, 149-150, 177 
Balzac, Honors de, 404-408 
Baour-Lormian, 336, 337 
Barante, 412 
Barbisr, Auguste, 391 
Barbieri, Nicolo, 198 
Barlaam ctjoasaph, 5 
Barnave, 339 
Baron, 207, 229, 262 
ESartas, Du, 117 



Barthel^my, Abb£, 329 

Basoche, La, 76 

Bassompierre, 239 

Batteux, Charles, 306 

Baude, Henri, 63 

Bayle, Pierre, 243-245 

Beaulieu, Geoffroy de, 51 

Beaumarchais, 265, 323-325 

Bejart, Armande, 200 

Bejart, Madeleine, 198 

Bellay, Jean du, 88 

Bellay, Joachim du, 98, 99, 100, 104- 

Belleau, Remi, 98, 103-104 

Benedictines, the, 254 

Benoit de Sainte-More, 15 

Benserade, 140, 208 

B£ranger, J. -P. de, 366-367 

Bercuire, Pierre, 46 

Bernard, 258 

Bernard, Saint, 44 

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 272, 325- 

329 
Bcrnay, Alexandre de, 16 
Bernis, 258 
Beroul, 19 
Bertaut, Jean, 106 
Beitin, 258 

Beyle, Henri, 366, 398-399 
Beze, Theodore de, 94, 107 
Bichat, 341 

Bien-Avisi, Mal-Avise", 72 
Blanc, Louis, 412 
Blois, Gui de, 54 
Bodel, Jean, 67 
Bodin, Jean, 111 



438 



INDEX 



Bo^tie, La, 96, 122 

Boileau, Nicolas, 183-189, 241, 242 

Boisguillebert, 304 

Boissbnarle, J.-F., 354 

Bolingbroke, 284 

Bonald, Vicomte de, 357 

Bonnet, Charles, 302 note 

Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 139, 153, 

202, 219-226, 233, 276 
Bouillon, Duchesse de, 190, 191, 214 
Buunin, Gabriel, 107 
Bourdaloue, 202, 227 
Boursault, 207 
Brantome, 113-114 
Bretel, Jacques, 26 
Brizeux, Auguste, 391 
Buchanan, 106 
Bud6, Guillaume, 82, 87 
Buffon, 308-310, 327 
Bunbury, Lydia, 373 
Bussy-Rabutin, 176, 179 

Cabanis, 301 

Calas, Jean, 287 

Calvin, Jean, 92-94 

Campan, Mme. de, 253 

Campistron, 259 

Camus, Bishop, 132, 141 

Cantillon, 305 

Cato, Angelo, 56 

Caumartin, de, 283 

Caumartin, Mme. de, 176 

Caylus, Count de, 329 

Caylus, Mme. de, 253 

Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, 66 

Chamfort, 322 

Chapelain, Jean, 141, 147, 149, 162, 

177, 1S6 
Chapelle, 153, 184, 192 
Charles, Mme. , 368 
Charron, Pierre, 126-127 
Chartier, Alain, 60-61 
Chastelain, Georges, 65 
Chateaubriand, 328, 343, 348-353 
Chatelain de Couci, the, 27 
Chatelet, Mme. du, 285, 286 
Chaulieu, 256 



Chenedolle\ 337 

Ch£nier, Andre, 329-331, 338 

Chenier, Marie-Joseph, 335, 337 

Chesterfield, Lord, 275 

Chrestien, 116 

Chretien de Troyes, 17, 21 

Christine de Pisan, 60 

Clari, Robert de, 49 

Clermont, Mdlle. de, 275 

Collin d'Harleville, 336 

Commines, Philippe de, 55-57 

Comte, Auguste, 255, 360-361 

Condillac, 301 

Condorcet, 255, 303-304 

Confrene de la Passion, 68, 71, 160 

Conon de B^thune, 27 

Conrart, Valentin, 147 

Constant, Benjamin, 345, 411 

Coquillard, 63 

Coras, 214 

Corneille, Pierre, 139, 163-170, 204 

Corneille, Thomas, 171-172, 206 

Cotin, 186, 205 

Coulanges, Abbe de, 177 

Coulanges, Mme. de, 179 

Courier, Paul-Louis, 354-355 

Cousin, Victor, 358-359 

Crebillon, P. J. de, 259-260 

CreUn, 65 

Creuse 1 de Lesser, 337 

Cuvier, 341 

Cuvier, Le, 75 

Cyrano de Bergerac, 145-146, 197 

Dacier, Mme., 243 

DAguesseau, 299 

D'Alembert, 254, 295 

Danchet, 259 

Dan court, 262 

Dangeau, 239 

Daniel, 254 

Danse Macabre", 63 

Danton, 338, 339 

Daubenton, 309 

Daunou, 411 

Daurat, Jean, 98 1 

Dtbats, Journal de, 338 



INDEX 



439 



De Belloy, 261 

De Broglie, 412 

Decade Philosophique, 338 

De Feletz, 342 

Deffand, Mme. du, 253, 322 

Deforis, 221 

Delatouche, 401 

Delavigne, Casimir, 395 

Delille, 257-258 

Desaugiers, 336 

Desbordes-Valmore, Mme., 391 

Descartes, Rene\ 150-153 

Deschamps, Antony, 366 

Deschamps, Emile, 366 

Desfontaines, 300 

Desmarets de St.-Sorlin, 141, 142, 144, 

197, 241 
Des-Masures, Loys, 107 
Desmoulins, Camille, 338 
Desportes, Philippe, 105-106, 137 
Despreaux, see Boileau 
Destouches, 263 
Diderot, Denis, 254, 265, 272, 294- 

2 99. 302, 313 
Digulleville, Guillaume de, 43 

at, 258 
^ abos, Abbe\ 305 
Duche, 259 
Ducis, 261 
Duclos, 253 

Dudevant, Mme. , see Sand, George 
Dufresny, 262, 274 
Dumas, Alexandre, 394, 397 
Dumont, Abbe\ 370 
Dupont de Nemours, 304 
, Duplessis-Mornay, 115 
Du Ryer, 162, 170 
Dussault, 342 
Duval, 336 



Eneas, x6 

Enfants san Souci, 74, 76 
Epinay, Mme. d', 253, 314 
Estienne, Henri, 101 note, no, 115 j 
Estissac, Geoffroy d', 87 



Estoile, Pierre de 1', 114 note 
Etienne, 336 

Fabre d'Eglantine, 336 

Fantosme, Jordan, 47 

Fauchet, Claude, no 

Fauriel, 341 

Fayette, Mme. de la, 174, 179, 180-182 

Fenelon, 153, 230-234 

Flechier, 140, 228 

Fleury, 225 

Floovent, 8 

Florian, 259, 272 

Fontanes, 337, 349 

Fontenelle, 242, 243-245 

Foucher, Adele, 375 

Fougeres, Etienne de, 42 

Foulechat, Denis, 46 

Fouquet, 190, 200 

Fourier, 359 

Fournival, Richard de, 41 

Franc- Archer de Bagnolet, 74 

Francis I., 82 

Frederick the Great, 286, 288 

FreYon, 300 

Froissart, Jean, 53-55 

Furetiere, Antoine, 145, 211 

Gace Brule, 27 

Gaimar, 47 

Gaime, Abb£, 312 

Galiani, 254, 305 

Galland, 274 

Gamier, Robert, 108 

Gamier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, 6, 

47 
Gassendi, Pierre, 153 
Gautier, Theophile, 365, 387-390, 392 
Gautier de Cpinci, 6 
Gel£e, Jacquemart, 31 
Gens Nouveaux, 74 
Geoffrin, Mme., 254 
Geoffroi of Brittany, 28 
Geoffroy, 342 
Gerson, 44, 45 
Gilbert, 258-259, 300 
Gillot, 116 



440 INDEX 



Ginguene\ 341, 411 

Girardin, M. de, 315 

Girardin, Saint-Marc, 425 

Godeau, 139 

Goethe, 297, 345 

Gombault, 142 

Gomberville, 142 

Gournay, 305 

Gournay, Mdlle. de, 123 

Grandes Chroniques, 50 

Greban, Arnoul, 69 

Greban, Simon, 69 

Grecourt, 258 

Gresset, 258, 260, 263 

Gr£vin, 107 

Grignan, Mme. de, 178 

Grimm, Melchior, 307 

Gringoire, Pierre, 74 

Grisilidis, Histoire de, 68 

Guenfe, Abbe\ 300 

Guevara, 267 

Guillaume le Clerc, 42 

Guillaume le Marichal, Vie de, 47 

Guirlande de Julie, 140 

Guizot, Francois, 412, 414-416 

Guyon, Mme., 224,230 

Hamilton, Anthony, 256 
Hardouin, 254 
Hardy, Alexandre, 161 
Helgaire, 8 
Helvetius, 301 
Henault, 261 
Henri le Glichezare, 30 
Herberay des Essarts, 92 
Hoffman, 342 
Holbach, Baron d', 302 
Hospital, Michel del', 100, 115 
Hotman, Francois, 114 
Houdetot, Mme. d', 314, 318 
Huet, 242 

Hugo, victor, 365, 375-383. yp--y)z> 

396 
Hume, David, 315 

Jacot de Forest, 16 
Jansen, 156 



Jeannin, President, 114 note 
Jehan de Thuin, 16 
Jobelins, 140 
Jodelle, 98, 103, 107 
Joinville, Jean de, 50-52 
Joubert, Joseph, 342-343, 349 
Jouffroy, Theodore, 359 

La Barre, 288 ' 

Labe\ Louise, 97 

La Beaumelle, 179 

Laboureur, Louis le, 141 

La Bruyere, 235-238, 242 

La Calprenede, 142, 143 

Lacordaire, 357, 358 

La Fare, 256 

La Fontaine, Jean de, 189-195 

La Fosse, 259 

Lagrange, 302 

La Grange- Chancel, 259 

Laharpe, 261, 306-307 

La Haye, Fragment of, 9 

Lally, Count, 288 

Lamarck, 341 j 

Lamartine, Alphonse de, 329, 3671 

37i 
Lambert, Marquise de, 254, 269 '\ 
Lambert le Tort, 16 
Lamennais, 357-358 
La Mettrie, 300-301 
Lamoignon, de, 202 
La Motte-Houdart, 243, 256, 260 
Languet, Hubert, 114 
Lanoue, 113 
Laplace, 341 
Larivey, Pierre de, 109 
La Rochefoucauld, 173-175, 181, 18s 
Latini, Brunetto, 41 
Laya, Louis, 336 
Le Bel, Jean, 53 
Lebrun, Ecouchard, 258, 337 
Le Clerc, 214 
Lecomte, Valleran, 160 
Lefranc de Ppmpignan, 256 
Lefranc, Martin, 62 
Legouais, Chretien, 17, 58 
Legouv£, 335 



I 



INDEX 



441 



Le Maire de Beiges, Jean, 84 

Lemercier, Ndpomucene, 336, 337 

Lemierre, 258, 260 

Lemoyne, 141 

L'Empereur qui tua son Neveu, 73 

Leroy, Pierre, 116 

Lesage, 262, 266-268 

Lespinasse, Mdlle. de, 254, 322 

Letourneur, 261 

Le Vasseur, TheYese, 313 

Lille, Alain de, 37 

Lorens, Friar, 41 

Lorris, Guillaume de, 34-36 

Lyonne, Abb6 de, 266 



Mably, 255 

Machaut, Guillaume de, 59 

Maillard, Oliver, 45 

Maine de Biran, 341 

Maintenon, Mme. de, 118, 145, 179- 

180, 216, 217 
Mairet, Jean de, 162, 165, 196 
Maistre, Joseph de, 355-356 
Maistre, Xavier de, 409 
Malebranche, Nicolas de, 153 
Malherbe, Francois de, 100, 106, 134- 

136, 33* 
Mallet du Pin, 338 
Marbode, Bishop, 41 
Marguerite of Navarre, 82-84 
Marguerite of Navarre (wife of Henri 

IV.), 114 
Marie de France, 20, 28 
Marivaux, 262, 269-271 
Marmontel, 253, 260, 272, 300, 305- 

306 
Marnix de Ste. Aldegonde, 115 
Mascaron, 228 
Massillon, J.-B. , 228, 229 
Maupertuis, 286 
Maynard, 136 

Melin de Saint-Gelais, 86, 105 
Manage, 177, 205 
Minagier de Paris, 41 note 
Mendoza, 267 
Menot, Michel, 45 
Mercier, 265 



Mdri, Huon de, 43 

Merim^e, Prosper, 396, 408-410 

Meschinot, 65 

Meun, Jean de, 36-39 

M^zeray, 225 

Michaud, 411 

Michel, Jean, 69 

Michelet, Jules, 412, 418-422 '^ 

Mignet, Francois, 412, 416 

Millevoye, 337 

Mirabeau, 339-340 

Mirabeau (the elder), 281, 305 

Miracles de Notre-Dame, 68 

Moliere, Jean-Baptiste, 146, 169, 197- 

206 
Molinet, 65 

Monluc, Blaize de, 112-113 
Monstrelet, 55 

Montaigne, Michel de, 121-126 
Montalembert, 357, 358, 412 
Montchrestien, Antoine de, 120, 160 
Montesquieu, 57, in, 255, 273-280 
Montfleury, 207 

Montpensier, Mdlle. de, 176, 235 
Montreuil, Jean de, 46 
Moreau, H£g6sippe, 391 
Morellet, 300, 305 
Morelly, 255 
Mornay, Mme. de, 113 
Mothe le Vayer, la, 153 
Motteville, Mme. de, 176 
Muret, 106 
Musset, Alfred de, 383-387 

Naigeon, 302 

Namur, Robert of, 54 

Nangis, Guillaume de, 51 

Napoleon I. , 340 

Napoleon III., 369 

Navagero, 105 

Nerval, Gerard de, 388, 391 

Nevers, Due de, 214 

Nicole, 156, 178, 208, 209, 215 

Ninon, 183 

Nisard, D6sird, 425-426 

Nivart of Ghent, 30 

Nivelle de la Chausse"e, 264 



442 



INDEX 



Nodier, Charles, 366, 409 
Novare, Philippe de, 41 

Ogier, Francois, 162 
Oresme, Nicole, 46 
Orleans, Charles d', 61-62 
Orleans, Duchess of, 180, 212 
Ossat, d', 114 note 
Ouville, d', 196 
Ozanam, 412 

Palissot, 300 

Palissy, Bernard, 119 

Pare\ Ambroise, 119 

Parny, 258 

Partenopius de Blois, 22 

Pascal, Blaise, 154-159 

Pasquier, Estienne, no 

Passerat, Jean, 106, 116 

Patfielin, La Farce de, 66, 75-76 

Pclerinage de Jerusalem, n 

Pellisson, 148 

Perier, Mme., 158 

PeYiers, Bonaventure des, 84, 91 

Perrault, Charles, 241-242, 243 

Perron, du, 115 

Physiocrats, the, 304 

Picard, 336 

Piron, 258, 260, 263, 300 

Pithou, 116 

Pixerdcourt, 336 

Pomponne, 179 

Ponsard, 395 

Popeliniere, L. de la, 112 

Poquelin. See Moliere 

Port-Royal, 155, 252 

Pradon, 214 

Presles, Raoul de, 46 

Provost, Abbe\ 271-272 

Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 361-362 

Provins, Guiot de, 42 

Quesnay, Francois, 304, 305 
Quinault, Philippe, 169, 204, 206, 

207-208 
Quinet, Edgar, 412, 422-423 
Quinse Joies de Mariage, 66 



Rabelais, Francois, 87-91 

Racan, 136 

Racine, Jean, 172, 208-218 

Racine, Louis, 257 

Rambouillet, Hotel de, 139 

Ramee, Pierre de la, in 

Ramond, 321 note 

Raoul de Houdan, 43 

Rapin, 116 

Raynal, Abbe\ 321-322 

Rayounard, 336, 341 

R6camier, Mme., 352 

Ricits dun Minestrel de Reims, 50 

Regnard, 262 

Regnier, Mathurin, 136-138 

Renard, Roman de, 29 

Representation d Adam, 67 

Restif de la Bretonne, 272 

Retz, Cardinal de, 175-176 

Riccoboni, Mme., 270 note 

Richelieu, 147, 162, 176 

Rivarol, 338 

Robert de Boron, 21, 22 

Rocca, Albert de, 347 

Rohan, Chevalier de, 284 

Rojas, 106 

Roland, Mme., 253, 254. 322 

Roland, Song of , 9-1 1 

Rollin, 300 

Romulus, 28 note 

Ronsard, Pierre de, 97-103 

Rotrou, Jean, 162, 170-171, 196 

Roucher, 257 

Rouget de Lisle, 337 

Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste, 256, 283 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 272, 311- 

321, 327 
Roye, Jean de, 55 
Royer-Collard, 341 
Rutebeuf, 42, 43 

Sable, Mme. de, 173 
Sabliere, Mme. de, 192 
Sacy, de, 156 
Sagon, 85 
Saint-Amand, 144 
Saint-Cyrr -f> 



INDEX 



443 



Sainte-Beuve, 330, 365, 366,391, 426- 

427 
Saint-Evremond, 139, 183, 197, 209 
Saint-Just, 339 
Saint-Lambert, 257 
Saint-Martin, 355, 357 
Saint-Pierre, Abbe de, 304 
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, 359- 

360 
Saint-Simon, Due de, 238-241 
Sales, Francois de, 131-132 
Salle, Antoine de la, 65-66 
Sand, George, 400-404 
Sandeau, Jules, 401 
Sannazaro, 103 
Saurin, Bernard-Joseph, 261 
Saurin, Jacques, 228 
Scarron, Paul, 145, 197 
Sceve, Maurice, 97 
Schelandre, Jean de, 162 
Schiller, 345 

Schlegel, A. W. von, 346 
Scribe, Eugene, 395 
Scudery, Georges de, 142, 162, 163, 

165, 170 
Scudery, Mdlle. de, 92, 142, 143 
3cbonr1p. Raimond de, 123 
Secchi, 199 
Sedaine, 265 
Segrais, 181, 213, 235 
Senancourt, 341-342 
Serres, Olivier de, 119, 132 
Serviteur, Le Loyal, 112 note 
Sevigne, Mme. de, 143, 177-179, 191, 

210 
Simon, Richard, 220, 224, 225 
Sirven, 288 
Sismondi, 411-412 
Sorel, Charles, 144, 268 
Soulie, Frederic, 394 
Soyecourt, Marquis de, 200 
Staal-Delaunay, Mme. de, 253 
Stael, Mme. de, 343-348 
Steinhcewel, 28 
Stendhal. See Beyle 
Strasburg Oaths, 4 
Suard, 338 



Sue, Eugene, 397 
Sully, Maurice de, 44 
Surgeres, Helene de, 101 

Tabarin, 196 

Taille, Jacques de la, 107 

Taille, Jean de la, 108, log 

Tedbalt, 4 

Tencin, Mme. de, 245 

Thaon, Philippe de, 40 

Thebes, Romance of, 15 

Thiophile, 68 

Thibaut de Champagne, 27 

Thierry, Augustin, 412-414 

Thiers, Adolphe, 412, 417-418 

Thomas (Anglo-Norman poet), 19 

Thomas, A.-L., 306, 327 

Thou, De, 112 

Thyard, Pontus de, 98 

Tocqueville, A. de, 412, 416-417 

Tour-Landry, Livre du Chevalier de 

la, 41 note 
Touroude, 10 
Tracy, Destutt de, 301 
Tristan l'Hermite, 162, 170 
Turgot, 255 
Turnebe, Odet de, 109 

Uranistes, 140 

Urfe, Honore d', 92, 132-134 

Vair, Guillaume de, 120, 127, 134 

Valenciennes, Henri de, 49 

Valliere, Louise de la, 221 

Van Dale, 244 . 

Vauban, 304 

Vaugelas, 148 

Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, Jean, 106 

Vauvenargues, 281-282 

Vaux, Mme. Clothilde de, 360 

Velly, 254 

Vergniaud, 339 

Vertot, 254 

Viau, Theophile de, 138 

Vigny, Alfred de, 365, 371-374, 394, 

396 
Villehardouin, Geoffroy de, 48 



444 

Villemain, 424 

Villon, Francois, 63-65, 74 

Vincent de Paul, St. , 221 

Viole, Mdlle. de, 104 

Violette, Roman de la, 22 

Viret, 94 

Vivonne, Catherine de, 139 

Voiture, Vincent, 139, 140-141 

Volland, Mdlle., 298 



INDEX 



Volney, 303 

Voltaire, 229, 253, 255, 260, 272, 282- 



Voltaire 
293. 3*4 



Wace, 20, 47 
Walpole, Horace, 322 
Warens, Mme. de, 311, 312, 318 
Wenceslas, Duke, 54 



THE END 



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